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Zend Framework: Zend_Ascii Component Proposal

Proposed Component Name Zend_Ascii
Developer Notes http://framework.zend.com/wiki/display/ZFDEV/Zend_Ascii
Proposers Ben Scholzen
Matthew Weier O'Phinney (Zend Liaison)
Revision 1.0 - 19 January 2007: Initial proposal (wiki revision: 7)

Table of Contents

1. Overview

Zend_Ascii is a component to help a programmer creating elements out of characters. The current class only supports tables yet. You can define colspans, border styles and aligns for each column.

2. References

3. Component Requirements, Constraints, and Acceptance Criteria

  • This component will allow to define different border styles per table column and row
  • This component will allow setting the align in each column
  • This component will allow creating dropshadows to elements
  • This component will only work with UTF-8 encoded output

4. Dependencies on Other Framework Components

  • Zend_Exception

5. Theory of Operation

Zend_Ascii will be instantiated and Zend_Ascii_Elements can then be appended to it. Those elements can be Tables for example.
After all elements are appended to Zend_Ascii, the output string can be rendered.

6. Milestones / Tasks

  • Milestone 1: [DONE] Creating base class
  • Milestone 2: [DONE] Creating table support
  • Milestone 3: [DONE] Checking current state into http://zend_ascii.svn.dasprids.de/
  • Milestone 4: Proposal acceptance and import of current prototype to incubator SVN
  • Milestone 5: Unit tests exist and development.
  • Milestone 6: Documentation

7. Class Index

  • Zend_Ascii
  • Zend_Ascii_Exception
  • Zend_Ascii_Element_Interface
  • Zend_Ascii_Element_Table
  • Zend_Ascii_Element_Table_Column
  • Zend_Ascii_Element_Table_Row

8. Use Cases

UC-01

Creating a simple table

9. Class Skeletons

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5 Comments

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  1. Jan 19, 2008

    Lars Strojny

    How do you plan to incorporate this component into the MVC environment. From my point of view it would be the perfect view component for console applications.
    What about support for console display libraries like readline or ncurses?

  2. Jan 19, 2008

    Ben Scholzen

    The plan was, to make it as a useful component for text emails (like article tables for order confirments), and as you said, for console applications. There is no planned support vor console display libraries.

  3. Apr 10, 2008

    Ben Scholzen

    Hm, seems like windows can only handle default borders, but no double or thick borders. I guess I have to take out the different-border-feature.

  4. Jun 19, 2008

    Matthew Weier O'Phinney

    Zend Comments
    Zend_Ascii is accepted for development in standard/incubator, with the following requirements:
    • Rename to Zend_Text_Ascii
    • use the method name 'unichar()' instead of 'unichr' for consistency within the component
    • Reduce usage of static methods. The use cases actually become fairly clunky when using them. We suggest making these normal object methods with optional static variants to simplify the syntax.
    • Shuffle some of the methods. For instance, why is createColumn() on the table object, when columns are only consumed by rows?

  5. Apr 01, 2009

    Ben Scholzen

    Component known as Zend_Text_Table