Book Image

Persistence in PHP with Doctrine ORM

By : Kevin Dunglas
Book Image

Persistence in PHP with Doctrine ORM

By: Kevin Dunglas

Overview of this book

Doctrine 2 has become the most popular modern persistence system for PHP. It can either be used as a standalone system or can be distributed with Symfony 2, and it also integrates very well with popular frameworks. It allows you to easily retrieve PHP object graphs, provides a powerful object-oriented query language called DQL, a database schema generator tool, and supports database migration. It is efficient, abstracts popular DBMS, and supports PHP 5.3 features. Doctrine is a must-have for modern PHP applications. Persistence in PHP with Doctrine ORM is a practical, hands-on guide that describes the full creation process of a web application powered by Doctrine. Core features of the ORM are explained in depth and illustrated by useful, explicit, and reusable code samples. Persistence in PHP with Doctrine ORM explains everything you need to know to get started with Doctrine in a clear and detailed manner. From installing the ORM through Composer to mastering advanced features such as native queries, this book is a full overview of the power of Doctrine. You will also learn a bunch of mapping annotations, create associations, and generate database schemas from PHP classes. You will also see how to write data fixtures, create custom entity repositories, and issue advanced DQL queries. Finally it will teach you to play with inheritance, write native queries, and use built-in lifecycle events. If you want to use a powerful persistence system for your PHP application, Persistence in PHP with Doctrine ORM is the book you.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Using Doctrine's Entity Manager


The principle of an ORM is to manage data stored in a relational database through an object-oriented API. We learned about its underlying concepts earlier in this chapter.

Each entity class is mapped to the related database table. Properties of the entity class are mapped to the table's columns.

So, the rows of a database table are represented in the PHP app by a collection of entities.

Doctrine ORM is able to retrieve data from the database and to populate entities with them. This process is called hydration.

Note

Instead of entities, Doctrine can populate PHP arrays in different manners (with the object graph, with a rectangular result set, and so on). It is also possible to create custom hydrators by referring to the following link: http://docs.doctrine-project.org/en/latest/reference/dql-doctrine-query-language.html#hydration-modes

As we have learned with the Data Mapper design pattern, it also does the inverse job: it persists data held by entities to database.

We will play a lot with entities later.

Doctrine comes with the following files to map entities to tables:

  • Annotations in comment blocks that embed directly in the entities

  • XML configuration files

  • YAML configuration files

  • Plain PHP files

Annotations are fairly recent in the PHP world (they are popular in Java) but they are already widely used by Doctrine and Symfony communities. The advantages of this method are great readability and maintenance facility because mapping information is next to the PHP code. Putting mapping information directly in the code can also be a drawback in some contexts, especially for big projects that use several persistence systems.

We will use the annotation method in this book, but other methods are described in the Doctrine documentation. We will return to them in Chapter 2, Entities and Mapping Information.

In the next chapter, Chapter 2, Entities and Mapping Information, we will discover that Doctrine is smart enough to use mapping information to automatically create the related database schema.

For now, we will focus on retrieving an Entity Manager. As entities are retrieved, persisted, updated, and removed through it, this is the entry point of Doctrine ORM.

Edit the src/bootstrap.php file to retrieve a Doctrine's Entity Manager. Add the following code at the end of this file:

  $entitiesPath = array(__DIR__.'/Blog/Entity');
  $config = Setup::createAnnotationMetadataConfiguration    ($entitiesPath, $dev);
  $entityManager = EntityManager::create($dbParams, $config);

Tip

Downloading the example code

You can download the example code files for all Packt books you have purchased from your account at http://www.packtpub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files e-mailed directly to you.

The $entitiesPath property contains the list of paths to directories storing entity classes. We already mentioned that our app will follow the PSR-0 namespacing convention. The \Blog folder will be the root namespace and entity classes will be in the \Blog\Entity folder.

A Doctrine configuration is created to use annotations for mapping information and to be able to locate the blog's entities that we'll create.

A new EntityManager is created and configured to use our database and Doctrine settings.

For simplicity, we create a unique Entity Manager that will be used across the application. For real-world apps, you should take a look at the Dependency Injection design pattern.

Note

Find more on Dependency Injection pattern at the following link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_injection