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eZObjectWrapperBundle

A Symfony Bundle for eZPlatform / eZPublish 5 development (>=5.3).

Developed by the Kaliop team.

Description

This bundle offers a simple model to organize all the "business logic" code which deals with eZPublish Location and Content objects, keeping it away from Controllers, Commands and other application layers which relate to the Framework.

This way, if you change the definition of one of your ContentTypes, you will not have to hunt across the whole codebase to apply fixes but, ideally, change the code only in one place.

It also tries to adopt patterns which are familiar to Symfony developers who have not used eZPublish before. NB: if you are a Symfony developer please read the This is not your grandpa's ORM chapter further down to help avoid common pitfalls.

How it works

The bundle provides an Entity Manager service, which is used to retrieve Repository services. For each specific type of Content, a different Repository service is used.

Repository services are used to hold the logic to fetch Entities. A typical Repository method would be f.e. getLastTenModified().

Entity instances provide a lazy-loading wrapper for Contents and Locations. They are supposed to hold the logic to decode data from the Content Fields, and to fetch related Entities (without overloading the view Controller and creating a new kernel request). They are generally not configured as Symfony services (for a starter, they are not singletons).

Developers are supposed to create a new Repository and Entity class for each of the Content Types in use in the website; the easiest way to do so is to subclass the existing ones and just add in the custom business logic.

The twig helper

This bundle also provides a Twig function, renderLocation, which uses the ViewController as a service, and doesn't relaunch the Symfony kernel, for faster execution.

Installation

The recommended way to install this bundle is through Composer.

• Add the kaliop/ezobjectwrapperbundle package into your composer.json file :

• Add eZObjectWrapperBundle to EzPublishKernel.php:

Usage

Retrieving Entities

There are many more methods available in the Repository, you can retrieve an Entity by id, Content, Location, LocationId and even Remote Ids.

Calling methods or attributes of an Entity in Twig

Twig function render_location

This does render a Location without using a separate Controller and reloading the kernel

Creating your own Entities and Repositories

Let's imagine you want to handle the 'newsletter' content type.

1. Create an Entity class:

2. Create a Repository class, which relates to that:

3. Register the Repository with the Entity Manager

   (Note that this is "plain" configuration, it does not have to be in parameters)

4. Test that it works

5. Add new methods to the Entity and Repository classes

Advanced Usage

Registering new Repositories as services

We have seen above how to register a php class as Repository. Another way to register classes as repositories is to use tagged Symfony services. The main advantage that you get in exchange for a little bit more configuration is that you can now inject configuration settings into the repository.

Example:

Then, inside the Acme\AcmeBundle\Repository class, you can use the settings member:

NB: if you want to make sure that the settings injected into your custom Repository are always valid, you simply have to implement the validateSettings method

Passing configuration settings into the Entities

Since Entity classes are not registered as Symfony services, injecting settings into Entity instances might seem problematic at first instance. The enrichEntityAtLoad method is available in Repository classes for that purpose.

Allowing an Entity to generate URLs to its Location view

For this common scenario, Traits are made available, to be added to bot Repository an Entity classes

Allowing an Entity to render RichText fields as html

RichText fields need the help of a Symfony service to convert their xml content to html. Again, Traits are made available for that, to be added to bot Repository an Entity classes.

Allowing an Entity to fetch related Entities

A common usecase is when, given an instance of an Entity, you want to fetch its related object(s) as Entities too. A Trait is available for this case as well:

Kaliop\eZObjectWrapperBundle\Core\Traits\RelationTraversingEntity

Just add it to your Entity class and you will be able to use 2 new methods to retrieve the contents of its object relation(s) fields:

$relatedEntity = $this->getRelation('fieldName');
$relatedEntitiesArray = $this->getRelations('anotherFieldName');

Impact with the caches (a.k.a. don't shoot yourself in the foot)

When using the render_location twig helper, or using subclasses of Entity which fetch other Content objects in helper methods, be aware that you are introducing caching dependencies.

eZPublish by default goes to great lengths to make sure that the caches which keep the 'html version' of Content objects are automatically expired whenever the objects are edited. One might say that view-cache-expiration is the prime reason for using Symfony sub-requests when displaying a list of Content objects.

Whenever you end up displaying a Location which is not the current one, remember to add its Id to the X-Location-Id header in your main controller response, so that eZPublish will know when to clear its cache.

For more details see: https://doc.ez.no/display/EZP/HttpCache

This is not your grandpa's ORM

The EntityManager, Repository and Entity classes in eZObjectWrapper have only a vague resemblance with their counterparts in the Doctrine ORM. Please do not assume that you can use them the same way.

F.e., at the moment:

• Entities can not be persisted at all, except by using the eZPublish repository API
• There is no concept of creating Entities without attaching them to the EntityManager
• There is no DQL or other equivalent language
• the only Query builder available is the one from the eZPublish repository API

Contact

E-mail : [email protected] / [email protected]