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CakePHP ORM LazyLoad Plugin

This is an association lazy loader for CakePHP ORM entities. It allows you to lazily load association data by accessessing the property, without using contain() (the eager loader).

Installation

Requirements

• CakePHP ORM (or the full framework) 5.x
• sloth

$ composer require jeremyharris/cakephp-lazyload

For older versions of the CakePHP ORM, look at older releases of this library.

Usage

If you have a base entity, add the trait to get lazy loading across all of your entities. Or, attach it to a single entity to only lazy load on that entity:

src/Model/Entity/User.php

Associations to the Users table can now be lazily loaded from the entity!

Example

Let's assume that our base entity has the LazyLoadEntityTrait and:

With the lazy loader, all we need is the entity:

When accessing an association property (as if the data was eagerly loaded), the associated data is loaded automatically.

Using contain in conjunction with the lazy loader

The lazy loader will not overwrite results that are generated by the eager loader (contain()). You can continue to write complex contain conditions and still take advantage of the lazy loader.

Entity method support

Entities with the lazy loader trait support lazy loading using the different property access methods provided by the Cake ORM:

• Getters: $programmer->get('beers), $programmer->beers
• Has: $programmer->has('beers)
• Unset: $programmer->unsetProperty('beers')

When unsetting a property via Entity::unsetProperty(), the property will be prevented from being lazily loaded in the future for that entity, as it respects the state in the same way a typical Entity would. If you wish to re-hydrate an association, you can use Table::loadInto as provided by the ORM:

Testing

Sometimes in tests, we create entities that don't necessarily have tables. When accessing a property that doesn't exist, the LazyLoad trait will try to load the table in order to get association data, which would throw an error if the table doesn't exist. To prevent this, you can override _repository() in your entity:

By default, the LazyLoad trait will throw whatever error bubbles up TableRegistry::get().

Plugins

If testing plugins entities that don't have tables, make sure to override the _repository() method to return the plugin's table.

Notes

• Contain: This is not a replacement for contain(), which can write complex queries to dictate what data to contain. The lazy loader obeys the association's conditions that you set when defining the association on the table, but apart from that it grabs all associated data.
• Speed: Lazy loading in this manner isn't necessarily a speed improvement. In fact, it can be a detriment to speed in certain cases, such as looping over entities that lazy load associations within the loop (creates a single SQL query per-item rather than using joins or the ORM). This plugin is intended as a helper for bootstrapping projects.
• Hydration: The lazy loader requires that your result set is hydrated in order to provide lazy loading functionality.

Special thanks to @lorenzo for reviewing the plugin before its initial release!