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Introduction & Installation

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.

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. Similar things also happen when the object is persisted to the database, or removed.

The most common case of this type of task 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 the Blue Book: "Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software".

Features​

  • 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.
  • It has what we think is 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.

Installation​

Make sure Composer is installed globally, as explained in the installation chapter of the Composer documentation.

Open a command console, enter your project directory, and execute:

composer require rekalogika/reconstitutor

License​

MIT

Contributing​

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