Hi I am facing a common problem which any developer querying the database would face. In our web applications wherever we have more than one standard options for a field, we usually denote them as integers. Say, for gender, we store it as 1 or 2, but we display that as male or female in the user interface. So far I had been handling this translation in the presentation layer ie., just before displaying the data in the table, I check if the retrieved is "1" and then translate it to "male" and so on. But this becomes clumsy when we have lots of such standard options and when we need this translation in multiple places in the application. So now I am thinking of adding an abstract layer which does all the querying, retrieving and translation; and then return to my presentation layer, so that if my presentation layer just calls a function in the database abstract layer with the required query parameters, it gets back a resultset with the translations. I hope this is a very common problem every developer faces. I would like to have your guidance on this. I understand that a resultset object is not easy to replicate. How do I make these translations and store them back in an object and return it to the presentation layer? Or do we have existing PHP libraries which serve this purpose? Could you suggest me a better way of solving this problem? Please help me on this. Thanks Vignesh.
