how to get magento table name

Question

I have this global config:

<global>
    <models>
    <subscriber>
        <class>Giftlab_Subscriber_Model</class>
        <resourceModel>subscriber_resource</resourceModel>
    </subscriber>
    <subscriber_resource>
        <class>Giftlab_Subscriber_Model_Resource</class>
        <entities>
            <records>
                <table>subscriber_records</table>
            </records>
        </entities>
    </subscriber_resource>
    </models>
    <resources>
        <giftlab_subscriber_write>
            <connection>
                <use>core_write</use>
            </connection>
        </giftlab_subscriber_write>
        <giftlab_subscriber_read>
            <connection>
                <use>core_read</use>
            </connection>
        </giftlab_subscriber_read>
        <giftlab_subscriber_setup>
            <setup>
                <module>Giftlab_Subscriber</module>
                <class>Giftlab_Subscriber_Model_Resource_Setup</class>
            </setup>
            <connection>
                <use>core_setup</use>
            </connection>
        </giftlab_subscriber_setup>
    </resources>
</global>

in my mysql4-install-0.1.0.php file, I need to get the table name. How do I do it? I know it is something like this:

$this->getTable('subscriber_resource/records')

But that only produces an exception Can't retrieve entity config: subscriber_resource/records. What do I need to do to retrieve the table name?

Answer 1

Figured out the answer myself, although thanks to @Yaroslav for directing my to Alan Storm's tutorial, as that helped.

The answer is, I need this:

$this->getTable('subscriber/records');

where "subscriber" is the name of the config entry for the model (not the resource), and "records" is the entity. Turns out that when magento parses thinga/thingb, it always assumes that thinga before the slash is the model and dereferences that to get the resource, by looking in the config for <thinga><resourceModel>{resourcemodel}, and then looking again for <{resourcemodel}><entities><thingb><table> to get the table name.

So my config was correct, I was just getting confused between the idea of model and resource. Hope this helps someone else getting stuck on the same problem - I couldn't find any clear info on this in the various tutorials.