kohana orm retrieve only specified amount of characters from text column

Question

Currently I am writing a website using Kohana framework 3.3. Today, I wanted to create subpage where user would be able to browse news, however I encountered a small problem with Kohana ORM.

I would like to retrieve only a dozen / several dozen characters from a text field, because loading the entire field would be a significant waste of server resources.

Does anyone know how I can achieve the same effect as in those cases?

• ↓ MySQL/SQL retrieve first 40 characters of a text field?
• (preffered) http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/string-functions.html#function_left
• How to select only some characters from MySQL field?

Thanks in advance for your answers.

Answer 1

This isn't possible with the ORM class. You can build your own query with Kohana's own query builder and the object can be returned as an ORM-model, therefore you fill in your ORM model name (e.g. 'my_orm_model') in the as_object function.

Combining one of your suggested links with Kohana's own Query builder you would get something like this.

DB::Query(Database::SELECT,"SELECT LEFT(field, 40) AS excerpt FROM table(s) WHERE ...")->as_object('my_orm_class')->execute();

Answer 2

Looking at the code behind ORM, it seems it's not possible to load a partial model. You may have to use the Database_Query_Builder class, combined with DB::expr to achieve this.

Answer 3

ORM was designed for working with a whole records (queries like SELECT * FROM ...). You can store fulltext values in separated (MyISAM) table, so your ORM models will skip that field.