Skipper - The ORM Designer Blog
  • Skipper - The ORM Designer
  • VsBuilds - Parallel building
  • Pulpo - Free Skipper CLI

Guilty of idealism

Alternate foreign key

Hello Everybody,

ORM Designer was growing up in pretty idealistic environment. We wanted it to be a tool that will generate clean and readable code. Elegant tool for elegant solutions. In our minds the ORM Designer was not an ordinary ORM tool, but the sharp and efficient ORM scalpel.

However, developer’s life is not just polished garden of immaculate design solutions. Sometimes you need a hammer. And a big one. One of our users contacted us about pretty unusual solution, having a foreign key pointing to different column than the primary key.

At first, we did not like it. But then he presented his situation of multiple databases in great deal of detail, and we had to agree, that his solution might not be an elegant one, but it was the only reasonable one. Our goal is, after all, having ORM Designer help our users, and do their work for them.

So we have implemented this functionality as a part of our latest release (it is only supported by some frameworks though, namely Propel and Doctrine). You can learn more about it in our documentation.

Do you need to tackle a difficult task? Do you feel that ORM Designer could help you but something is missing? Let us know, we can add specific functions. After all, ORM Designer is a tool intended to help with all your work.

02 Jan 2014

Posted by: Martin "Freki" Stradej

Skipper features #features