The metaColumns method returns an array of adoFieldObject objects that represent the attributes of the columns of a specified table.

$m = $db->metaColumns('my_table');
 
print_r($m);

adoFieldObject Object
(
  [name] => actno
  [max_length] => 8
  [type] => INT
)

adoFieldObject Object
(
  [name] => actname
  [max_length] => 30
  [type] => VARCHAR
)

Note that the type of the data returned is the actualType. In order to retrieve the metaType , the value must be passed to:

$db->metaType($object->type);

For example, in the example above, the 'actname' field is of a type VARCHAR . If we pass this to metaType(), it returns the value C

Some drivers return an extended set of attributes that represent DBMS specific functionality. For example, the IBM DB2 driver returns the normal 3 attributes above plus the following 3:

[not_null] =>
[scale] =>
[primary_key] =>

If you are writing portable applications you should not rely on these attributes to be available across all databases.

This method metaColumnNames() returns just the column names from the table.

$ar = $db->metaColumnNames('test');
print_r($ar);
/*
 * Returns:
COLUMN_1=>column_1,
COLUMN_2=>column_2,
COLUMN_3=>column_3
*/