README

This library provides a thin layer that sits above Doctrine events to help you reconstitute/hydrate your entities. It lets you augment Doctrine's hydration with your logic in a concise and expressive class.

Full documentation: rekalogika.dev/reconstitutor

After Doctrine hydrates an object from the database, this framework gives you the control to hydrate additional properties not handled by Doctrine, without having to deal with the peculiarities of Doctrine events and Unit of Work. Then, after Doctrine persists the changes to the database, it lets you do similarly with the properties.

The most common case of this type of tasks is for handling file uploads, of which many specialized libraries have already been written. But plenty of other cases exist:

• A lazy-loading proxy that fetches the real resource using an API call.
• Linking objects that are managed by different object managers, or non-Doctrine entities.

These days, we usually call the process hydration. Reconstitution is the term used by Eric Evans in "Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software".

Features

• Streamlines a very specific, yet very common use case of Doctrine events.
• Simple declaration in a class. You can create a reconstitutor class to handle the reconstitution of a specific entity class, entities that implement a specific interface, entities in a class hierarchy, or those with a specific PHP attribute.
• Our abstract classes provide get() and set() methods as a convenience. They let you work with the properties directly, bypassing getters and setters. It is the best practice in reconstitutions as it frees you to have business logic in the getters and setters.
• The get() and set() methods are forwarders to a custom implementation of Symfony's PropertyAccessorInterface. Therefore, you can use the same exceptions defined in PropertyAccessorInterface.
• Abstracts all the peculiarities of Doctrine events, unit of work, and proxy, so you don't have to find out and deal with them yourself.
• It has what we consider the correct behavior. It asks your reconstitutor to save only after Doctrine has successfully saved the object. It doesn't rely on Doctrine seeing the object being dirty before flush()-ing. i.e. your entities don't have to modify a Doctrine-managed property —like $lastUpdated— just to make sure the correct Doctrine event will be fired.

Example

A very simple file upload handling:

use Rekalogika\Reconstitutor\AbstractClassReconstitutor;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\File\File;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\File\UploadedFile;

/**
 * @extends AbstractClassReconstitutor<Order>
 */
final class OrderReconstitutor extends AbstractClassReconstitutor
{
    /**
     * The class that this reconstitutor manages. It can also be a super class
     * or an interface.
     */
    public static function getClass(): string
    {
        return Order::class;
    }

    /**
     * When the object is being saved, we check if the paymentReceipt has been
     * just uploaded. If it is, we save it to a file.
     * 
     * Note: in Symfony, an uploaded file is represented by an instance of
     * `UploadedFile`, otherwise it will be a `File` object.
     */
    public function onSave(object $order): void
    {
        $path = sprintf('/tmp/payment_receipt/%s', $order->getId());

        $file = $this->get($order, 'paymentReceipt');

        if ($file instanceof UploadedFile) {
            file_put_contents($path, $file->getContent());
            $this->set($order, 'paymentReceipt', new File($path));
        }
    }

    /**
     * When the object is being loaded from the database, we check if the
     * supposed payment receipt is already saved. If it is, then we load the
     * file to the property.
     */
    public function onLoad(object $order): void
    {
        $path = sprintf('/tmp/payment_receipt/%s', $order->getId());

        if (file_exists($path)) {
            $file = new File($path);
        } else {
            $file = null;
        }

        $this->set($order, 'paymentReceipt', $file);
    }

    /**
     * If the order is being removed, we remove the associated payment receipt
     * here.
     */
    public function onRemove(object $order): void
    {
        $path = sprintf('/tmp/payment_receipt/%s', $order->getId());

        if (file_exists($path)) {
            unlink($path);
        }
    }
}

Documentation

rekalogika.dev/reconstitutor

License

MIT

Contributing

Issues and pull requests should be filed in the GitHub repository rekalogika/reconstitutor.