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Jasny Meta

The Jasny Meta library allows you to attach metadata to a class and class properties. The metadata is available at runtime and can be used to trigger particular behaviour.

Installation

The Jasny Meta package is available on packagist. Install it using composer:

composer require jasny/meta

Annotations

Metadata can be specified through annotations. In PHP annotations are written in the docblock and start with @. If you're familiar with writing docblocks, you probably recognize them.

Here's an example of obtaining metadata for given class:

In here:

• $source is an implementation of Jasny\Meta\Source\SourceInterface - to obtain metadata from class and return it as associative array
• $cache is an implementation of Jasny\Meta\Cache\CacheInterface - to handle caching meta
• $meta returned is an instance of Jasny\Meta\MetaClass.

Lets look closely at all of those.

Meta Sources

Source is an object that actually obtains metadata from class definition. We have three classes of sources defined:

• Jasny\Meta\Source\PhpdocSource - for obtaining metadata, defined in doc-comments
• Jasny\Meta\Source\ReflectionSource - for obtaining some generic information, using reflection methods
• Jasny\Meta\Source\CombinedSource - a class that uses other sources to get meta and to merge it in a single output array

PhpdocSource

Given a class:

We obtain metadata:

In here we used two additional dependencies:

• Jasny\ReflectionFactory\ReflectionFactory - class for creating reflections, is defined in Jasny Reflection factory
• Jasny\PhpdocParser\PhpdocParser - class for parsing doc-comments, is defined in Jasny PHPDoc parser

ReflectionSource

This class does not take any information from doc-comments, but fetches data using only reflection methods.

Having a class from previous example as input, we obtain metadata:

$reflectionFactory dependency is the same as defined in the upper example for PhpdocSource.

CombinedSource

Here's an example for the same class definition:

As you see, meta, obtained by means of $phpdocSource and $reflectionSource, was merged into a single array.

Caching

The second parameter to pass to factory constructor is an instance of Jasny\Meta\Cache\CacheInterface. It is used to cache metadata between calls for the same class name.

We have two implementations of cache:

• Jasny\Meta\Cache\None - actually does not perform any caching, used to simplify a code for cache usage
• Jasny\Meta\Cache\Simple - caching into a process memory (so in array). This cache does not persist among different php processes and lasts till the current process ends.

So if you don't want to cache meta, just use a $cache = new Jasny\Meta\Cache\None().

Meta

Meta returned by factory is an instance of Jasny\Meta\MetaClass. It has the following methods to obtain data:

• get(string $key, $default = null) - get class meta by key
• is(string $key): bool - check if meta key exists and is not empty
• has(string $key): bool - check if meta key exists (can be empty)
• getProperty(string $name): ?MetaProperty - obtain metadata for given class property. Result is either null, if property does not exists, or an instance of Jasny\Meta\MetaProperty
• getProperties(): array - get metadata for all class properties as array of Jasny\Meta\MetaProperty objects

MetaProperty class implements the first three methods of those (so get, is and has).