Recently for a project we had the following situation: Users have their own specific databases, however each database has the same schema. Since there are an unlimited number of databases this prevented us from using databases.yml to define which tables need to go to which databases. The user’s database connection would be defined at run time and we needed only certain tables to be bound to that connection. A bunch of googling turned not much up, mostly talking about defining it in the databases.yml file. After a little bit of searching through some of the Doctrine documentation I came across bindComponent. This allows you to tell a model to use a specific connection. For example:
The above would bind the model ‘SomeModel’ to the connection ‘UsersConnection’. To make this so that it is automatically done each time it is executed a good place to add it is a custom filter.
Also if you plan on storing the user’s database passwords it is a good practice to encrypt them. Look into possibly using the class sfCrypt for this.