PHP Class Generator Eclipse plug-in / News: Recent posts

The new version 1.0.6 has been released.
It can be installed easily via the update site or downloaded here on sourceforge.

New functions and features include:
- added support for relations between tables (1:1 and 1:n relations)
- removed forced lowercase function for member names and class names (only first letter of name will be changed to lowercase now if needed)
- plausibility check for setters for database fields that have a max length configured
- generated API Doc for members now also displays database field settings like max length, data type, encoding and null-ability
cleaned templates a bit to suppress empty lines in code generation
- added toJSONString method to generated objects
- feature request 3442000: getters and setters in generated code can now be grouped by member variable
- updated wizard help content
- feature request 3441998: included switch in wizzard to disable API doc generation in generated classes for smaler file sizes
- feature request 3441997: implemented isset() check in init method to prevent errors if fields are not set

FInaly there is an eclipse update site to make it easier to install and get the latest version of the PHP Class Generator Eclipse Plugin.
Use this URL within the eclipse Updates Manager under "Help > Install New Software":
http://phpclassgenerator.schallschlucker.de/

Let me know if you experience any issues while installing/updating the plugin, I hope everythings works :-)

A new version of PHP Class Generator has been released with the following improvements:
* added Eclipse Help content for plug-in
* added context Help for Wizard
* added new constant TO_HTMLSTRING for XML template as replacer. Will result in generation of a toHTMLString function when used in template. This function will render a HTML view of the object to be formated using CSS classes
* added simpleTemplate (for stand alone PHP classes to be generated without any dependency to other classes, like database connection providers, includes etc.), defaultTemplate (recommended template to be used with a central database connection DAO) and customTemplate (use your own code template for creating PHP classes, examples can be found on https://sourceforge.net/projects/phpclgenerator/ in the file section) selection in wizard and included new simpleTemplate and defaultTemplate with new function toHTMLString and cleaned code indentation
* code of generated functions is indented using tabs for better readability of generated PHP classes
* table to select database table from will be auto filled if all connection parameters are still set
* "test DB connection and get available tables" will display SQL error message if connection settings are invalid
* added new node "templateinformation" to class template, to allow specification of template version and name, which will be added to the generated php classes to figure out which template has been used to create a php class. E.g. <templateinformation version="1.0" name="PHP class generator simple template" />

a new release is available. These are the main new features:
- last wizard settings will now be saved with every click on "finish"
- creation of multiple database classes with one wizard run

Since the 6th October 2009 this plug-in is listed in the software catalogue of Softpedia:
<a href="http://www.softpedia.com/get/Programming/Components-Libraries/PHP-Class-Generator-Eclipse-plug-in.shtml"><img border="0" src="http://www.softpedia.com/images/softpedia_download_small.gif"/></a>

In the near future this plugin will be included as part of the project http://sourceforge.net/projects/codegenjava/develop This reduces the amount of time I must invest to maintain two projects and offers you a whole new set of generating php artifacts. For those eager what awaits you check out the project best by updating from http://www.sahits.ch/project/javacodegen/update/

Tyler Anderson wrote an article based on this plugin from installation to use at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-eclipse-phpclassgen/

At http://blog.sahits.ch/?p=138 I described the possibilities of this plug-in.

The new release provides more possibilities in the template. Check it out

Version 1.0.1 hooks into the PDT project of eclipse instead of PHP Eclipse. For further details see http://phpclassgenerator.sahits.ch/

The initial release is out now.