I only use ` in MySQL and only where the field or table name is a reserved word i.e. you have a field called date so the query ends up like

SELECT title, `date` FROM sometable

I use ‘ and " within PHP for different things:

if we have a variable called $test with a value of “this is my sample data”;

‘ spits out exactly what’s within the apostrophes (variable aren’t evaluated) so

echo 'My text is: $test';

will output

My text is: $test

" allows the variables to be evaluated so

echo "My text is: $test";

will output

My text is: this is my sample data

mysqldump -uroot -pPASSWORD database > c:\database.sql

but when I ran this I was presented with an “Access Denied” message.

My first thought was that the MySQL database username and password that I was using was incorrect, however this message refers to not having permissions to create the file c:\database.sql.

Once I realised this was a file permissions problem and not a database permissions problem I changed the path to one I knew I had write access on and the database exported without any problems.

As my use of Symfony is increasing I find myself frustrated that there doesn’t appear to be an easy way to get the raw SQL from a doctrine query object so I can simply output it and paste it into phpMyAdmin to debug problems with the SQL. I may be wrong about this but as yet I have not found a built in function to perform this operation.

Sure I am able to output the query with the “?” indicating where the necessary values are to go and I can also easily output the array of query parameters so I can substitute these manually but this takes time and it would be much much simpler and quicker to just output the whole query with the substitution already done so it’s a simply copy and paste of the raw SQL from the doctrine query object straight into phpMyAdmin.

I have wrote a quick function to do this and I had meant to post this for a while but I just have not had the chance to get round to it until now.

The code for this is can be found below:-

function get_raw_sql($query) {
    $query->limit(0);
 
    $queryStringParts = split('\?', $query->getSQL());
    $iQC = 0;
    $queryString = "";
 
    foreach($query->getParams() as $param) {
        if(is_numeric($param)) {
            $queryString .= $queryStringParts[$iQC] . $param;
        } elseif(is_bool($param)) {
            $queryString .= $queryStringParts[$iQC] . $param*1;
        } else {
            $queryString .= $queryStringParts[$iQC] . '\'' . $param . '\'';
        }
        $iQC++;
   }
 
   for($iQC;$iQC < count($queryStringParts);$iQC++) {
       $queryString .= $queryStringParts[$iQC];
   }
   echo $queryString;
}

In my case this is a global function but it could very well be written as a static function in a debug class.

$query is a Doctrine Query object and this function iterates round the parameters for the query string and replaces each instance of a “?” with the corresponding variable. It has a crude (but fairly effective so far) method of determine whether it’s a string, number or boolean when performing this substitution and so far this works well in all the cases I’ve used it.

The $query->limit(0); is very important as the $query->getSQL() function does not work properly in this context if a limit is specified on the query so as we are wanting to debug the SQL and a majority of the time we are not concerned with the limit I have opted to remove this from this routine.

Hopefully this will allow you to save some time and effort trying to get the raw SQL from your doctrine query objects and I would appreciated any comments, thoughts or ideas you may have for improvement.

• When copying a query into eSense Visualizers (from notepad or Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio) it puts strange characters into the editor window which do not seem to cause any problems with the query running but does result in error message dialog boxes each time you go to the query editor.  The only way I’ve solved this so far is to save the query as a view or stored procedure and call that from eSense Visualizers.
• Formatting can take ages to apply and can be lost if the query changes even slightly and although it is a little more stable when you use stored procedures but it can still be a royal pain.  As the project progressed some of the stored procedure names are not accurate now but I’m extremely hesistant to rename then as I’m pretty sure I’ll have to re-do the formatting for a large proportion of the entities I have created.
• There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to copy a entity and I’ve spend hours creating entities and formatting them when I could have been done in around 30 minutes if I could simply have copied the entity and changed a parameter value.
• When updating a query the data on the screen does not always refresh right away and I have to edit the web part and click “Apply” before it will show the updated results.  I can understand that the caching is to try and avoid too many of the same queries being sent to the database, however, I can loose a good bit of time because I have to go through this process each time I update the query for entity and on a server that has decided it’s time for a go-slow… it’s not too good!

I don’t know if these are in to be addressed in future releases (or if there is currently configuration option I don’t know about) but I hope so as it would certainly make my life a good bit easier.