I am using TYPO3 8. In my extension I have a database table "company" in which I store for each company the total number of places (number_places) and the number of occupied places (occupied_places).
Now I want to limit the search to companies which have available places left.
In MySQL it would be like this:
SELECT * FROM company WHERE number_places > occupied_places;
How can I create this query in the extbase repository?
I tried to introduce the virtual property placesLeft in my model but it did not work.
I don't want to use a raw SQL statement as mentioned below, because I already have implemented a filter which uses plenty of different constraints.
Extbase query to compare two fields in same table
You can do it like this in your repository class, please note the comments inside the code:
class CompanyRepository extends \TYPO3\CMS\Extbase\Persistence\Repository
{
public function findWithAvailablePlaces(bool $returnRawQueryResult = false)
{
// Create a QueryBuilder instance
$queryBuilder = $this->objectManager->get(\TYPO3\CMS\Core\Database\ConnectionPool::class)
->getConnectionForTable('company')->createQueryBuilder();
// Create the query
$queryBuilder
->select('*')
->from('company')
->where(
// Note: this string concatenation is needed, because TYPO3's
// QueryBuilder always escapes the value in the ExpressionBuilder's
// methods (eq(), lt(), gt(), ...) and thus render it impossible to
// compare against an identifier.
$queryBuilder->quoteIdentifier('number_places')
. \TYPO3\CMS\Core\Database\Query\Expression\ExpressionBuilder::GT
. $queryBuilder->quoteIdentifier('occupied_places')
);
// Execute the query
$result = $queryBuilder->execute()->fetchAll();
// Note: this switch is not needed in fact. I just put it here, if you
// like to get the Company model objects instead of an array.
if ($returnRawQueryResult) {
$dataMapper = $this->objectManager->get(\TYPO3\CMS\Extbase\Persistence\Generic\Mapper\DataMapper::class);
return $dataMapper->map($this->objectType, $result);
}
return $result;
}
}
Notes:
If you have lots of records to deal with, I would - for performance reasons - not use the data mapping feature and work with arrays.
If you want to use the fluid pagination widget, be sure you don't and build your own pagination. Because of the way this works (extbase-internally), you'd get a huge system load overhead when the table grows. Better add the support for limited db queries to the repository method, for example:
class CompanyRepository extends \TYPO3\CMS\Extbase\Persistence\Repository
{
public function findWithAvailablePlaces(
int $limit = 10,
int $offset = 0,
bool $returnRawQueryResult = false
) {
// ...
$queryBuilder
->setMaxResults($limit)
->setFirstResult($offset);
$result = $queryBuilder->execute()->fetchAll();
// ...
}
}
I think you cant do this using the default Extbase Query methods like equals() and so on. You may use the function $query->statement() for your specific queries like this.
You also can use the QueryBuilder since TYPO3 8 which has functions to compare fields to each other:
https://docs.typo3.org/typo3cms/CoreApiReference/latest/ApiOverview/Database/QueryBuilder/Index.html#quoteidentifier-and-quoteidentifiers
It's fine to use this QueryBuilder inside Extbase repositories. After this you can use the DataMapper to map the query results to Extbase models.
In case of using "statement()" be aware of escaping every value which may cause any kind of SQL injections.
Based on the current architecture of TYPO3, the data structure is such that comparing of two tables or, mixing results from two tables ought to be done from within the controller, by injecting the two repositories. Optionally, you can construct a Domain Service that can work on the data from the two repositories from within the action itself, in the case of a routine. The service will also have to be injected.
Note:
If you have a foreign relation defined in your table configuration, the results of that foreign relation will show in your defined table repository. So, there's that too.
I've been asked to make a program I've written work with two different data providers: MS SQL and Oracle.
I've written two separate edmx files: one for the MS SQL database and one for the Oracle SQL database. Other than the fact that they use different data providers, the schema of the data is exactly the same.
I now have two entity sets and two entity classes.
Since the classes have the same properties, is it possible to use the same .net class for both entity sets?
I got the idea that this may be possible because as the system tried to generate two classes with the same name in different edmx files, it produced an error that said that the properties were defined more than once!
If your database schemas are exactly the same, you can work this out by using one Model with multiple connection strings configured.
To make the code more cleaner, you may inherit two context classes from the one generated for your model:
public class MSSQLContext : YourGeneratedContext
{
public MSSQLContext()
: base("MSSQLDatabase") /*MS SQL connection string name in your config file*/
{
}
}
and
public class OracleContext : YourGeneratedContext
{
public OracleContext()
: base("OracleDatabase") /*Oracle connection string name in your config file*/
{
}
}
Next, where needed you can create instance of MSSQLContext or OracleContext, you can work with the two at the same time as well..
using(OracleContext mainContext = new OracleContext())
{
using(MSSQLContext mirrorContext = new MSSQLContext())
{
}
}
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/jj592674.aspx
While creating an app in Laravel 4 after reading T. Otwell's book on good design patterns in Laravel I found myself creating repositories for every table on the application.
I ended up with the following table structure:
Students: id, name
Courses: id, name, teacher_id
Teachers: id, name
Assignments: id, name, course_id
Scores (acts as a pivot between students and assignments): student_id, assignment_id, scores
I have repository classes with find, create, update and delete methods for all of these tables. Each repository has an Eloquent model which interacts with the database. Relationships are defined in the model per Laravel's documentation: http://laravel.com/docs/eloquent#relationships.
When creating a new course, all I do is calling the create method on the Course Repository. That course has assignments, so when creating one, I also want to create an entry in the score's table for each student in the course. I do this through the Assignment Repository. This implies the assignment repository communicates with two Eloquent models, with the Assignment and Student model.
My question is: as this app will probably grow in size and more relationships will be introduced, is it good practice to communicate with different Eloquent models in repositories or should this be done using other repositories instead (I mean calling other repositories from the Assignment repository) or should it be done in the Eloquent models all together?
Also, is it good practice to use the scores table as a pivot between assignments and students or should it be done somewhere else?
I am finishing up a large project using Laravel 4 and had to answer all of the questions you are asking right now. After reading all of the available Laravel books over at Leanpub, and tons of Googling, I came up with the following structure.
One Eloquent Model class per datable table
One Repository class per Eloquent Model
A Service class that may communicate between multiple Repository classes.
So let's say I'm building a movie database. I would have at least the following following Eloquent Model classes:
Movie
Studio
Director
Actor
Review
A repository class would encapsulate each Eloquent Model class and be responsible for CRUD operations on the database. The repository classes might look like this:
MovieRepository
StudioRepository
DirectorRepository
ActorRepository
ReviewRepository
Each repository class would extend a BaseRepository class which implements the following interface:
interface BaseRepositoryInterface
{
public function errors();
public function all(array $related = null);
public function get($id, array $related = null);
public function getWhere($column, $value, array $related = null);
public function getRecent($limit, array $related = null);
public function create(array $data);
public function update(array $data);
public function delete($id);
public function deleteWhere($column, $value);
}
A Service class is used to glue multiple repositories together and contains the real "business logic" of the application. Controllers only communicate with Service classes for Create, Update and Delete actions.
So when I want to create a new Movie record in the database, my MovieController class might have the following methods:
public function __construct(MovieRepositoryInterface $movieRepository, MovieServiceInterface $movieService)
{
$this->movieRepository = $movieRepository;
$this->movieService = $movieService;
}
public function postCreate()
{
if( ! $this->movieService->create(Input::all()))
{
return Redirect::back()->withErrors($this->movieService->errors())->withInput();
}
// New movie was saved successfully. Do whatever you need to do here.
}
It's up to you to determine how you POST data to your controllers, but let's say the data returned by Input::all() in the postCreate() method looks something like this:
$data = array(
'movie' => array(
'title' => 'Iron Eagle',
'year' => '1986',
'synopsis' => 'When Doug\'s father, an Air Force Pilot, is shot down by MiGs belonging to a radical Middle Eastern state, no one seems able to get him out. Doug finds Chappy, an Air Force Colonel who is intrigued by the idea of sending in two fighters piloted by himself and Doug to rescue Doug\'s father after bombing the MiG base.'
),
'actors' => array(
0 => 'Louis Gossett Jr.',
1 => 'Jason Gedrick',
2 => 'Larry B. Scott'
),
'director' => 'Sidney J. Furie',
'studio' => 'TriStar Pictures'
)
Since the MovieRepository shouldn't know how to create Actor, Director or Studio records in the database, we'll use our MovieService class, which might look something like this:
public function __construct(MovieRepositoryInterface $movieRepository, ActorRepositoryInterface $actorRepository, DirectorRepositoryInterface $directorRepository, StudioRepositoryInterface $studioRepository)
{
$this->movieRepository = $movieRepository;
$this->actorRepository = $actorRepository;
$this->directorRepository = $directorRepository;
$this->studioRepository = $studioRepository;
}
public function create(array $input)
{
$movieData = $input['movie'];
$actorsData = $input['actors'];
$directorData = $input['director'];
$studioData = $input['studio'];
// In a more complete example you would probably want to implement database transactions and perform input validation using the Laravel Validator class here.
// Create the new movie record
$movie = $this->movieRepository->create($movieData);
// Create the new actor records and associate them with the movie record
foreach($actors as $actor)
{
$actorModel = $this->actorRepository->create($actor);
$movie->actors()->save($actorModel);
}
// Create the director record and associate it with the movie record
$director = $this->directorRepository->create($directorData);
$director->movies()->associate($movie);
// Create the studio record and associate it with the movie record
$studio = $this->studioRepository->create($studioData);
$studio->movies()->associate($movie);
// Assume everything worked. In the real world you'll need to implement checks.
return true;
}
So what we're left with is a nice, sensible separation of concerns. Repositories are only aware of the Eloquent model they insert and retrieve from the database. Controllers don't care about repositories, they just hand off the data they collect from the user and pass it to the appropriate service. The service doesn't care how the data it receives is saved to the database, it just hands off the relevant data it was given by the controller to the appropriate repositories.
Keep in mind you're asking for opinions :D
Here's mine:
TL;DR: Yes, that's fine.
You're doing fine!
I do exactly what you are doing often and find it works great.
I often, however, organize repositories around business logic instead of having a repo-per-table. This is useful as it's a point of view centered around how your application should solve your "business problem".
A Course is a "entity", with attributes (title, id, etc) and even other entities (Assignments, which have their own attributes and possibly entities).
Your "Course" repository should be able to return a Course and the Courses' attributes/Assignments (including Assignment).
You can accomplish that with Eloquent, luckily.
(I often end up with a repository per table, but some repositories are used much more than others, and so have many more methods. Your "courses" repository may be much more full-featured than your Assignments repository, for instance, if your application centers more around Courses and less about a Courses' collection of Assignments).
The tricky part
I often use repositories inside of my repositories in order to do some database actions.
Any repository which implements Eloquent in order to handle data will likely return Eloquent models. In that light, it's fine if your Course model uses built-in relationships in order to retrieve or save Assignments (or any other use case). Our "implementation" is built around Eloquent.
From a practical point of view, this makes sense. We're unlikely to change data sources to something Eloquent can't handle (to a non-sql data source).
ORMS
The trickiest part of this setup, for me at least, is determing if Eloquent is actually helping or harming us. ORMs are a tricky subject, because while they help us greatly from a practical point of view, they also couple your "business logic entities" code with the code doing the data retrieval.
This sort of muddles up whether your repository's responsibility is actually for handling data or handling the retrieval / update of entities (business domain entities).
Furthermore, they act as the very objects you pass to your views. If you later have to get away from using Eloquent models in a repository, you'll need to make sure the variables passed to your views behave in the same way or have the same methods available, otherwise changing your data sources will roll into changing your views, and you've (partially) lost the purpose of abstracting your logic out to repositories in the first place - the maintainability of your project goes down as.
Anyway, these are somewhat incomplete thoughts. They are, as stated, merely my opinion, which happens to be the result of reading Domain Driven Design and watching videos like "uncle bob's" keynote at Ruby Midwest within the last year.
I like to think of it in terms of what my code is doing and what it is responsible for, rather than "right or wrong". This is how I break apart my responsibilities:
Controllers are the HTTP layer and route requests through to the underlying apis (aka, it controls the flow)
Models represent the database schema, and tell the application what the data looks like, what relationships it may have, as well as any global attributes that may be necessary (such as a name method for returning a concatenated first and last name)
Repositories represent the more complex queries and interactions with the models (I don't do any queries on model methods).
Search engines - classes that help me build complex search queries.
With this in mind, it makes sense every time to use a repository (whether you create interfaces.etc. is a whole other topic). I like this approach, because it means I know exactly where to go when I'm needing to do certain work.
I also tend to build a base repository, usually an abstract class which defines the main defaults - basically CRUD operations, and then each child can just extend and add methods as necessary, or overload the defaults. Injecting your model also helps this pattern to be quite robust.
Think of Repositories as a consistent filing cabinet of your data (not just your ORMs). The idea is that you want to grab data in a consistent simple to use API.
If you find yourself just doing Model::all(), Model::find(), Model::create() you probably won't benefit much from abstracting away a repository. On the other hand, if you want to do a bit more business logic to your queries or actions, you may want to create a repository to make an easier to use API for dealing with data.
I think you were asking if a repository would be the best way to deal with some of the more verbose syntax required to connect related models. Depending on the situation, there are a few things I may do:
Hanging a new child model off of a parent model (one-one or one-many), I would add a method to the child repository something like createWithParent($attributes, $parentModelInstance) and this would just add the $parentModelInstance->id into the parent_id field of the attributes and call create.
Attaching a many-many relationship, I actually create functions on the models so that I can run $instance->attachChild($childInstance). Note that this requires existing elements on both side.
Creating related models in one run, I create something that I call a Gateway (it may be a bit off from Fowler's definitions). Way I can call $gateway->createParentAndChild($parentAttributes, $childAttributes) instead of a bunch of logic that may change or that would complicate the logic that I have in a controller or command.
I'm exploring using FluentValidation as it seems to be an elegant API for validation of my ViewModels upon model binding. I'm looking for opinions on how to properly centralize validation using this library as well as from my business (service) layer and raise it up to the view without having 2 different approaches to adding modelstate errors.
I'm open to using an entirely different API but essentially looking to solve this branching validation strategy.
[Side Note: One thing I tried was to move my business method into my FluentValidation's custom RsvpViewModelValidator class and using the .Must method but it seemed wrong to hide that call in there because if I needed to actually use my Customer object they I would have to re-query it again since its out of scope]
Sample Code:
[HttpPost]
public ActionResult AcceptInvitation(RsvpViewModel model)
{
//FluentValidation has happened on my RsvpViewModel already to check that
//RsvpCode is not null or whitespace
if(ModelState.IsValid)
{
//now I want to see if that code matches a customer in my database.
//returns null if not, Customer object if existing
customer = _customerService.GetByRsvpCode(model.RsvpCode);
if(customer == null)
{
//is there a better approach to this? I don't like that I'm
//splitting up the validation but struggling up to come up with a
//better way.
ModelState.AddModelError("RsvpCode",
string.Format("No customer was found for rsvp code {0}",
model.RsvpCode);
return View(model);
}
return this.RedirectToAction(c => c.CustomerDetail());
}
//FluentValidation failed so should just display message about RsvpCode
//being required
return View(model);
}
[HttpGet]
public ActionResult CustomerDetail()
{
//do work. implementation not important for this question.
}
To give some closure to the question (and make it acceptable) as well as summarize the comments:
Business/process logic and validation logic are two entities. Unless the validation ties in to the database (e.g. check for unique entries) there's no reason to group validation into one location. Some are responsible in the model making sure there's nothing invalid about the information, and some handle how the validated values are used within the system. Think of it in terms of property getters/setters vs the logic used in the methods with those properties.
That being said, separating out the processes (checks, error handling, etc.--anything not relating to UI) can be done in a service layer which also tends to keep the application DRY. Then the action(s) is/are only responsible for calling and presenting and not performing the actual unit of work. (also, if various actions in your application use similar logic, the checks are all in one location instead of throw together between actions. (did I remember to check that there's an entry in the customer table?))
Also, by breaking it down in to layers, you're keeping concerns modular and testable. (Accepting an RSVP isn't dependent on an action in the UI, but now it's a method in the service, which could be called by this UI or maybe a mobile application as well).
As far as bubbling errors up, I usually have a base exception that transverses each layer then I can extend it depending on purpose. You could just as easily use Enums, Booleans, out parameters, or simply a Boolean (the Rsvp either was or wasn't accepted). It just depends on how finite a response the user needs to correct the problem, or maybe change the work-flow so the error isn't a problem or something that the user need correct.
You can have the whole validation logic in fluent validation:
public class RsvpViewValidator : AbstractValidator<RsvpViewModel>
{
private readonly ICustomerService _customerService = new CustomerService();
public RsvpViewValidator()
{
RuleFor(x => x.RsvpCode)
.NotEmpty()
.Must(BeAssociatedWithCustomer)
.WithMessage("No customer was found for rsvp code {0}", x => x.RsvpCode)
}
private bool BeAssociatedWithCustomer(string rsvpCode)
{
var customer = _customerService.GetByRsvpCode(rsvpCode);
return (customer == null) ? false : true;
}
}
I'm looking at using doctrine for an application I'm working on - but after reading the documentation I'm having trouble conceptualizing how to represent the database structure we have in terms of entities.
I have many tables which have partner tables which hold translation data like the following....
Where I would like to have one Entity (Navigation Element) which had access to the 'label' field depending on what Language I set in my application. The following from the Doctrine documentation seems to suggest that you need to define one (single) table which is used to persist an entity
http://www.doctrine-project.org/docs/orm/2.0/en/reference/basic-mapping.html
By default, the entity will be
persisted to a table with the same
name as the class name. In order to
change that, you can use the #Table
annotation as follows:
Or do I need to define two entities and link them (or allow the translation table to inherit from the element table).
And what strategy would I use to always insert a language_id clause to the Join (to ensure I'm pulling the right label for the currently set language). Is this something I would define in the entity itself, or elsewhere?
This seems to suit a One-To-Many Bidirectional association. This is the scenario from that page translated to your situation:
/** #Entity */
class NavigationElement
{
// ...
/**
* #OneToMany(targetEntity="NavigationElementTranslation", mappedBy="navigationElement")
*/
private $translations;
// ...
public function __construct() {
$this->translations = new \Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection();
}
}
/** #Entity */
class NavigationElementTranslation
{
// ...
/**
* #ManyToOne(targetEntity="NavigationElement", inversedBy="translations")
* #JoinColumn(name="navigation_element_id", referencedColumnName="id")
*/
private $navigationElement;
// ...
}
You could add a getLabel($languageId) method to the NavigationElement entity that searches through the translations to get the correct label:
public function getLabel($languageId) {
foreach($this->translations as $trans) {
if($trans->languageId == $languageId)
return $trans->label;
}
throw new InvalidArgumentException();
}
And you could use the following DQL to ensure you only load the translation you want into the $translations property:
$query = $em->createQuery(
"SELECT ne, net
FROM Entity\NavigationElement ne
JOIN ne.translations net WITH net.languageId = :langId"
);
$query->setParameter('langId', $languageId);
$navigationElements = $query->execute();
This situation sounds like one where you would want to cache aggressively. Make sure you look into Doctrine 2's caching mechanisms too.
Also, internationalization can be handled reasonably well in PHP with gettext if you find join tables for translations start to become unmanageable.
I would also direct anyone who has to tackle this same problem to take a look at the following doctrine extension.
http://www.gediminasm.org/article/translatable-behavior-extension-for-doctrine-2