Michelangelo van Dam has a recent post to his blog about a difficulty he was having with his Zend Framework application and setting up some data models.

I was struggling getting my data models (as described in the Zend Framework Quickstart) to work with relations. My first solution was to create a database view that merged that data using joins to collect this data in a format that I could use in my data models. This was going great until I looked at my database where it contained over 20 views (along with 20 data models, mappers and db table gateways) ! So I said to myself there had to be another way.

His other way came in the form of the Zend_Db_Table_Relationships component and, after a bit of work, it did just what he needed. He shares how you can set them up similarly by walking you through the creation of a sample application ("datamodels") and linking together a series of sample tables with a Db_Table class using relationships, a simple model to abstract data access and a model mapper class to redefine some of the based functions (like "findAll") to pull in data from other tables.