tflori/orm - Working With Relations

Working With Relations

Relations can be used for joins in EntityFetcher and of course to fetch related objects from Entity. In this doc we want to describe how and what else you can do with these relations. How to add relations and how to remove relations.

All examples refer to this definitions:

class Article extends ORM\Entity {
    protected static $relations = [
        'additionalData' => ['one', ArticleAdditionalData::class, 'article'], // 1:1
        'comments' => [ArticleComments::class, 'article'], // 1:n
        'categories' => [Category::class, ['id' => 'articleId'], 'articles', 'article_category'], // n:m
        'writer' => [User::class, ['userId' => 'id']] // n:1
    ];
}

class ArticleAdditionalData extends ORM\Entity {
    protected static $relations = [
        'article' => [Article::class, ['articleId' => 'id']]
    ];
}

class ArticleComments extends ORM\Entity {
    protected static $relations = [
        'article' => [Article::class, ['articleId' => 'id']]
    ];
}

class Category extends ORM\Entity {
    protected static $relations = [
        'articles' => [Article::class, ['id' => 'categoryId'], 'categories', 'article_category']
    ];
}

class User extends ORM\Entity {}

$em = new \ORM\EntityManager();

Fetch relations

You can fetch relations with fetch($relation) and with getRelated($relation) (or the magic getter). For a relation with cardinality one you will always receive the Entity (or null). But for relations with cardinality many you will receive an array from getter and an EntityFetcher from fetch.

The getter will only execute a query when it is not fetched previously. Fetch will always call fetch($class) on the EntityManager. For an owner it can use the primary key and therefore it can use the mapping without executing a query.

For many-to-many relations the getter will first fetch all primary ids from relation table and then use fetch($class, $primaryKey) from EntityManager. Under some circumstances this can be faster.

The method getRelated($relation) can be called by magic getter with the name of the relation as property. This might not work when there is a column with the same name as the relation.

/** @var Article $article */
$article = $em->fetch(Article::class, 1);

echo get_class($article->getRelated('writer')), "\n"; // User
echo get_class($article->writer), "\n"; // User
echo get_class($article->fetch('writer')), "\n"; // User

echo gettype($article->getRelated('comments')), "\n"; // array
echo get_class($article->getRelated('comments')[0]), "\n"; // ArticleComment
echo get_class($article->fetch('comments')), "\n"; // ORM\EntityFetcher

Update Relations

You can update relations with setRelated($relation, $entity) for owners. For non owner in one-to-one and one-to-many relations you have to get the owner and call setRelated() on the owner.

For many-to-many relations there is no owner - you can not just set the related entity. So there are two other methods: addRelated($relation, $entities) and deleteRelated($relation, $entities).

// Example - Create a comment:
/** @var Article $article */
if ($article = $em->fetch(Article::class, 1)) {
    $comment = new ArticleComment();
    $comment->author = 'iras';
    $comment->text = 'Awesome!';
    $comment->setRelated('article', $article);
    $comment->save($em);
}

// Example - create an article
/** @var User $user */
if ($user = @$_SESSION['user']) {
    $em->getConnection()->beginTransaction();
    
    $article = new Article();
    $article->title = 'An amazing title that points out nothing';
    $article->setRelated('writer', $user);
    $article->addRelated('categories', [$em->fetch(Category::class)->where('key', 'php')]);
    $article->save();
    
    $additional = new ArticleAdditionalData();
    $additional->text = 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...';
    $additional->setRelated('article', $article);
    $additional->save();
    
    $em->getConnection()->commit();
}

// Example - update categories
/** @var Article $article */
if ($article = $em->fetch(Article::class, 1)) {
    $currentCategories = $article->getRelated('categories');
    $categoryKeys = $_POST['categories'];
    $newCategories = $em->fetch(Category::class)->where('key', $categoryKeys)->all();
    
    $em->getConnection()->beginTransaction();
    $article->deleteRelated(array_diff($currentCategories, $newCategories));
    $article->addRelated(array_diff($newCategories, $currentCategories));
    $em->getConnection()->commit();
}

Eager loading of relations

Loading relations in a loop is a pretty bad idea considering that each query requires at least 10/1000 of a second. To avoid this we implemented eager loading which means that we load a relation for all known objects with one query (or two in case of a many-to-many relation).

All methods of eager loading support nested relations by dividing relations with a dot .. That also means that you should avoid dots inside the relation name.

Load relations with the EntityFetcher

The most common way will be to define in the EntityFetcher that you want to load the relations. For that we created a method EntityFetcher::with(...$relations). This method can be called multiple times and with multiple strings. It will return $this for chaining.

For example load the latest articles with tags, writer and its company:

$articles = $em->fetch(Article::class)->limit(10)->orderBy('created', 'DESC')
    ->with('tags', 'writer.company')->all();

NOTE that this will only be executed with EntityFetcher::all()

Load relations from the Entity

From an entity you can also fetch the related objects and all nested related objects of that related objects. Use Entity::load($relation) to load them. This method returns $this so that you can chain them if necessary.

For example load all comments including the writers of each comment:

$article = $em->fetch(Article::class, 1);
$article->load('comments.writer');

This might become handy in an API:

$article = $em->fetch(Article::class, 1);
$response = json_encode($article->load('tags')->toArray());

Eager load a relation from an array of relations

It is also possible to load the relations at any time, but you have to make sure that all entities have the same type. To do so use EntityManager::eagerLoad($relation, ...$entities). Internally we also use this method to execute the eager loading.

For example load the tags of all articles:

$articles = $em->fetch(Article::class)->all();
// maybe filter them by some application logic
$em->eagerLoad('tags', ...$articles);