Multiple entries with Zend_Config_XML

I had been in need of a class to read config data into both the PHP-GTK OSInet back-office front end, and the back-office client UI for the Drupal 5.x offload module, and hesitated between various solutions, ranging from roll-our-own to the various frameworks out there and the existing PEAR packages.

Since Zend Framework appears to be well on its way to becoming a standard for professional PHP developers, I figured I'd give it a spin :

1. work notes within Zend Framework (ZF) regularly allude to CLI and GTK, although I could not find any concrete example about using ZF classes within a PHP-GTK app
2. ZF includes a tempting Zend_Config class, which seems to cover our needs in a simple fashion

The good news is that it works like a charm, although ZF has not yet reached version 1.0. The Zend_Config_XML manual page is sufficient to demonstrate how to use the code, but skips an important point : configuration files frequently have to include a list of values. A time honored practice in INI files is to number variables and read them in until failure occurs. Seeing how Zend_Config_XML parses the file, I figured it might be more useful to declare the list and use it directly, so here is a sample config file for the offload Drupal module:

And here is the simplistic code that loads the table list:

<?phperror_reporting(E_ALL|E_STRICT);require_once 'Zend/Config/Xml.php';$window = new GtkWindow();/* ... skip vanilla PHP-GTK initialization ... */$filename = 'offload_conf.xml';$config = new Zend_Config_Xml($filename, 'offload');$tables = explode(',', $config->tables->list);/* ... skip further processing ... */$window->show_all();Gtk::main();?>

That's it: $tables now contains the list of tables. No need for a loop of test, just a simple array explode.