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WORM (Wordpress ORM)

Under active development

A lightweight, Doctrine style ORM for Wordpress 4.8+. Requires PHP 5.5+

This library borrows a lot of concepts from Doctrine for Symfony including the mapper, entity manager, repositories, one-to-many entity relationships, lazy-loading of related entities and a query builder.

It acts as a layer sitting on top of the internal Wordpress $wpdb class.

All queries are run through the internal Wordpress $wpdb->prepare() function to protect against SQL injection attacks.

Why?

I came to Wordpress from a Symfony development background. I wanted to work with objects instead of manually writing SQL queries. I looked around for a good ORM and was unable to find anything that fulfilled my requirements.

Getting Doctrine to work with Wordpress was complex and seemed like overkill as it's a very heavy weight library.

There's also: https://github.com/tareq1988/wp-eloquent which is really good, but is more of a query builder for existing Wordpress tables.

Version history

master branch = active development

0.1.0 tag = previous master. The version most people would be using circa last 2022.

Installation

Usage

Create a model

To use the ORM, first create a class that extends the ORM base model and add a number of properties as protected variables. The property names must exactly match the desired SQL column names (there is no name mapping).

Note that a property of $id is added to the model when you do extends BaseModel so you do not need to add that.

Example:

The class annotations are as follows:

ORM_Type Should always be "Entity"

ORM_Table This is the actual table name in the database without the wordpress suffix. So with a default Wordpress installation, this will create a table called: wp_product in your database.

ORM_AllowSchemaUpdate This allows or blocks a database schema update with the updateSchema() function (see below). For your custom models, you want to set this to True. When mapping models to existing Wordpress tables (such as wp_posts), this should be set to False to avoid corrupting that table.

The property annotations are as follows:

ORM_Column_Type The MySQL column type.

ORM_Column_Length The MySQL column length.

ORM_Column_Null The MySQL column NULL setting. (The only valid option here is 'NOT NULL'). For NULL, just omit this annotation.

Update the database schema

Once you have a model object, you need to tell Wordpress to create a table to match your model.

Use the mapper class:

First, get an instance of the ORM mapper object. This static function below makes sure new Mapping() is called once per request. Any subsequent calls to ::getMapper() will return the same object. This means you don't need to continually create a new instance of Mapper() and parse the annotations.

Now update the database schema for this class as follows:

This function uses the internal Wordpress dbDelta system to compare and update database tables. If your table doesn't exist, it will be created, otherwise it checks the schema matches the model and modifies the database table if needed.

You should only run this function either when your plugin is activated or during development when you know you have made a change to your model schema and want to apply it to the database

Persisting objects to the database.

Use the ORM manager:

Create a new instance of your model:

Get an instance of the ORM manager class. Like the Mapping class, this static function returns a reusable instance of the manager class.

Now queue up these changes to apply to the database. Calling this does NOT immediately apply the changes to the database. The idea here is the same as Doctrine: you can queue up many different changes to happen and once you're ready to apply them, the ORM will combine these changes into single SQL queries where possible. This helps reduce the number of calls made to the database.

Once, you're ready to apply all changes to your database (syncing what you have persisted to the database), call flush():

Now check your database and you'll see a new row containing your model data.

Querying the database

Use the ORM manager:

Get an instance of the ORM manager class.

Get the object repository. Repositories are classes that are specific to certain object types. They contain functions for querying specific object types.

By default all object types have a base repository which you can get access to by passing in the object type as follows:

With the query builder

You can create a query though this repository like so:

Available where() operators are:

Available orderBy() operators are:

To use the "IN" and "NOT IN" clauses of the ->where() function, pass in an array of values like so:

Now you have your query, you can use it to get some objects back out of the database.

Note that if there was just one result, $results will contain an object of the repository type. Otherwise it will contain an array of objects.

To force getResults() to always return an array (even if it's just one results), call it with TRUE like this:

Built-in repository query functions

Building a query every time you want to select objects from the database is not best practice. Ideally you would create some helper functions that abstract the query builder away from your controller.

There are several built-in functions in the base repository.

Return an object by id:

Return all objects sorted by ascending id.

Return all objects matching pairs of property name and value:

To add more repository query functions, you can subclass the BaseRepository class and tell your object to use that instead of BaseRepository. That is covered in the section below called: Create a custom repository

Saving modified objects back to the database

To modify an object, load the object from the database modfiy one or more of it's values, call flush() to apply the changes back to the database.

For example:

This works because whenever an object is persisted ot loaded from the database, Wordpres ORM tracks any changes made to the model data. flush() syncronizes the differences made since the load (or last flush()).

Deleting objects from the database

To remove an object from the database, load an object from the database and pass it to the remove() method on the manager class. Then call flush() to syncronize the database.

For example:

Dropping model tables from the database.

It's good practice for your plugin to clean up any data it has created when the user uninstalls. With that in mind, the ORM has a method for removing previously created tables. If you have created any custom models, you should use this function as part of your uninstall hook.

Use the mapper class:

First, get an instance of the ORM mapper object.

Now pass the model classname to dropTable() like this:

Create a custom repository

@todo

Relationships

@todo

Exceptions

Wordpress ORM uses Exceptions to handle most failure states. You'll want to wrap calls to ORM functions in try {} catch() {} blocks to handle these exceptions and send errors or warning messages to the user.

For example:

The exceptions are as follows.

Pre-defined models

@todo

Dependencies

(Dependencies are automatically handled by Composer).

https://github.com/marcioalmada/annotations

https://github.com/myclabs/deepcopy

Credits

Maintained by: https://github.com/rjjakes

This library is under active development, so I'll happily accept comments, issues and pull requests.