FOR ARCHIVAL PURPOSES ONLY

The information in this wiki hasn't been maintained for a good while. Some of the projects described have since been deprecated.

In particular, the "Ushahidi Platform v3.x" section contains information that is often misleading. Many details about this version of Platform have changed since.

This website is an extraction of the original Ushahidi wiki into a static form. Because of that, functions like logging in, commenting or searching will not work.

For more documentation, please refer to https://docs.ushahidi.com

Skip to end of metadata
Go to start of metadata

There are several ways to access the database from a Ushahidi 2.x controller: 

  • Calling functions in Kohana models - this is preferred (we're working in an Model-View-Controller framework) 
  • Calling the Kohana ORM - occasionally (e.g. for simple queries or a rare database access across multiple database tables).  ORM calls are also preferred in the model functions called above. 
  • Using mysql code - bad and naughty, but sometimes necessary in Kohana 2.3.1, which doesn't handle things like joins and groups well (Kohana 3 is better).

Model calls

Examples of accessing database tables using their models:

In the reports controller: 

$total_reports = Incident_Model::get_total_reports(TRUE);

In the incident model: 

public static function get_total_reports($approved = FALSE)
 {
 return ($approved)
 ? ORM::factory('incident')->where('incident_active', '1')->count_all()
 : ORM::factory('incident')->count_all();
 }

Note that the incident model uses an ORM call to access the incident table in the database. 

ORM calls

If you look at the Ushahidi v2.x code, you'll see a lot of ORM calls. For instance:

To return a row from the table when you know the row id: 

    $report = ORM::factory('incident', $category_id);

To return all rows from a table: 

    $reports = ORM::factory('incident')->find_all();

To return the number of rows from a table: 

    $reportcount = ORM::factory('incident')->count_all();

These are made more useful by adding filters, ordering etc to the ORM calls, e.g. 

    $reports = ORM::factory('incident')
      ->where('incident_verified', '1')
      ->where('incident_active', '1')
      ->find_all();
    $reports = ORM::factory('incident')
      ->orderby(array('incident_date'=>'ASC'))
      ->find_all();

The ORM library is powerful and has many more things it can do - see the Kohana ORM Library pages for more information on these. 

MySQL Calls

If you have to do this, here's how:

  • create a database object to call: 
    $db = new Database();
  • Create your convoluted sql statement:
  • Call the database with your sql statement:
    $db->query($sql);