Retrieving data using the models

We will start by implementing the menu page. The initial functionality of the menu page will be to retrieve a list of all the milkshakes in alphabetical order.

Defining the criteria

To retrieve a result set, we have to initialize a Criteria object and customize it. This object then represents an SQL query. As our custom classes extend the base class, we use one of a number of methods of the parent. Passing the Criteria object to the method results in the query that is performed on our database. The Criteria object can handle both simple and relatively complicated queries. However, as a rule it is a good practice to customize the Criteria object to only retrieve what you want. This will be covered in detail in Chapter 9,Optimizing for performance.

Opening the lib/model/MilkShakePeer.php file reveals that there are no methods. As this is a custom class, it is up to us to add our business logic. Here we need to create a static method to retrieve data about all...