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ArangoDB-PHP - A PHP client for ArangoDB

This driver for ArangoDB, called the ArangoDB-PHP client, allows REST-based access to documents on the server. The DocumentHandler class should be used for these purposes. There is an example for REST-based documents access in the examples/document.php file.

Furthermore, the PHP client also allows to issue more AQL complex queries using the Statement class. There is an example for this kind of statements in the examples/aql-query.php file.

To use the PHP client, you must include the file autoloader.php from the main directory. The autoloader cares about loading additionally required classes on the fly. The autoloader can be nested with other autoloaders.

The ArangoDB PHP client is an API that allows you to send and retrieve documents from ArangoDB from out of your PHP application. The client library itself is written in PHP and has no further dependencies but just plain PHP 5.6 (or higher).

The client library provides document and collection classes you can use to work with documents and collections in an object-oriented fashion. When exchanging document data with the server, the library internally uses the HTTP REST interface of ArangoDB. The library user does not have to care about this fact as all the details of the REST interface are abstracted by the client library.

Requirements

• PHP version 5.6 or higher

Note on PHP version support:

This driver ceases to support old PHP versions as soon as they have reached end-of-life status. Support is removed with the next minor or patch version of the driver to be released.

In general, it is recommended to always use the latest PHP versions in order to take advantage of all the improvements (especially in performance).

Important version information on ArangoDB-PHP

The ArangoDB-PHP driver version has to match with the ArangoDB version:

• ArangoDB-PHP v3.8.x is on par with the functionality of ArangoDB v3.8.x
• ArangoDB-PHP v3.9.x is on par with the functionality of ArangoDB v3.9.x

etc.

Installation using Composer or Git

To get started, you need PHP 5.6 or higher plus an ArangoDB server running on any host that you can access.

There are two alternative ways to get the ArangoDB PHP client:

• Using Composer
• Cloning the git repository

Alternative 1: Using Composer

If you use Composer, you can run the following command in a command-line to install the PHP client:

Alternative 2: Cloning the Git repository

When preferring this alternative, you need to have a Git client installed. To clone the ArangoDB-PHP client repository from GitHub, execute the following command in your project directory:

This creates an arangodb-php subdirectory in your current directory. It contains all the files of the client library. It also includes a dedicated autoloader that you can use for autoloading the client libraries class files. To invoke this autoloader, add the following line to your PHP files that need the library:

The ArangoDB-PHP client's autoloader only cares about its own class files and does not handle any other files. That means it is fully nestable with other autoloaders.

If you do not wish to include autoload.php to load and setup the autoloader, you can invoke the autoloader directly:

Set up the connection

In order to use ArangoDB, you need to specify the connection options. You can do so by creating a PHP array $connectionOptions. Put this code into a file named test.php in your current directory:

This makes the client connect to ArangoDB

• running on localhost (OPTION_HOST)
• on the default port 8529 (OPTION_PORT)
• with a connection timeout of 3 seconds (OPTION_TIMEOUT)

When creating new documents in a collection that does not yet exist, you have the following choices:

• auto-generate a new collection: if you prefer that, set OPTION_CREATE to true

• fail with an error: if you prefer this behavior, set OPTION_CREATE to false

When updating a document that was previously/concurrently updated by another user, you can select between the following behaviors:

• last update wins: if you prefer this, set OPTION_UPDATE_POLICY to last

• fail with a conflict error: if you prefer that, set OPTION_UPDATE_POLICY to conflict

Setting up Active Failover

By default, the PHP client connects to a single endpoint only, by specifying a string value for the endpoint in the connection options, e.g.

To set up multiple servers to connect to, it is also possible to specify an array of servers instead:

Using this option requires ArangoDB 3.3 or higher and the database running in Active Failover mode.

The driver tries to connect to the first server endpoint in the endpoints array by default, and only try the following servers if no connection can be established. If no connection can be made to any server, the driver throws an exception.

As it is unknown to the driver which server from the array is the current leader, the driver connects to the specified servers in array order by default. However, to spare a few unnecessary connection attempts to failed servers, it is possible to set up caching (using Memcached) for the server list. The cached value contains the last working server first, so that as few connection attempts as possible need to be made.

In order to use this caching, it is required to install the Memcached module for PHP, and to set up the following relevant options in the connection options:

Create collections

This is just to show how a collection is created. For these examples it is not needed to create a collection prior to inserting a document, as we set ArangoConnectionOptions::OPTION_CREATE to true.

So, after we get the settings, we can start with creating a collection. We create a collection named users.

The below code first sets up the collection locally in a variable name $user, and then pushes it to the server and returns the collection ID created by the server:

Create documents

After we created the collection, we can start with creating an initial document. We create a user document in a collection named users. This collection does not need to exist yet. The first document we insert in this collection creates the collection on the fly. This is because we have set OPTION_CREATE to true in $connectionOptions.

The below code first sets up the document locally in a variable name $user, and then pushes it to the server and returns the document ID created by the server:

Document properties can be set by using the set() method, or by directly manipulating the document properties.

As you can see, sending a document to the server is achieved by calling the save() method on the client library's DocumentHandler class. It needs the collection name (users in this case) plus the document object to be saved. save() returns the document ID as created by the server. The ID is a numeric value that might or might not fit in a PHP integer.

Add exception handling

The above code works but it does not check for any errors. To make it work in the face of errors, we wrap it into some basic exception handlers:

Retrieve documents

To retrieve a document from the server, the get() method of the DocumentHandler class can be used. It needs the collection name plus a document ID. There is also the getById() method which is an alias for get().

Whenever the document ID is yet unknown, but you want to fetch a document from the server by any of its other properties, you can use the CollectionHandler->byExample() method. It allows you to provide an example of the document that you are looking for. The example should either be a Document object with the relevant properties set, or, a PHP array with the properties that you are looking for:

This returns all documents from the specified collection (here: users) with the properties provided in the example (here: that have an attribute name with a value of "John"). The result is a cursor which can be iterated sequentially or completely. We have chosen to get the complete result set above by calling the cursor's getAll() method.

CollectionHandler->byExample() returns multiple documents if the example is ambiguous.

Update documents

To update an existing document, the update() method of the DocumentHandler class can be used. In this example we want to:

• set state to 'CA'
• change the likes array

To remove an attribute using the update() method, an option has to be passed telling it to not keep attributes with null values. In this example we want to remove the age:

The document that is updated using the previous example must have been fetched from the server before. If you want to update a document without having fetched it from the server before, use updateById():

Replace documents

To completely replace an existing document, the replace() method of the DocumentHandler class can be used. In this example we want to remove the state attribute:

The document that is replaced using the previous example must have been fetched from the server before. If you want to replace a document without having fetched it from the server before, use replaceById():

Delete documents

To remove an existing document on the server, the remove() method of the DocumentHandler class can be used. remove() just needs the document to be removed as a parameter:

Note that the document must have been fetched from the server before. If you haven't fetched the document from the server before, use the removeById() method. This requires just the collection name (here: users) and the document ID.

Drop collections

To drop an existing collection on the server, use the drop() method of the CollectionHandler class. drop() just needs the name of the collection name to be dropped:

Run AQL queries

To run an AQL query, use the Statement class.

The method Statement::execute creates a Cursor object which can be used to iterate over the query's result set.

Note: by default the Statement object will create a Cursor that converts each value into a Document object. This is normally the intended behavior for AQL queries that return entire documents. However, an AQL query can also return projections or any other data that cannot be converted into Document objects.

In order to suppress the conversion into Document objects, the Statement must be given the _flat attribute. This allows processing the results of arbitrary AQL queries:

Bulk document handling

The ArangoDB-PHP driver provides a mechanism to easily fetch multiple documents from the same collection with a single request. All that needs to be provided is an array of document keys:

Custom Document class

If you want to use custom document class you can pass its name to DocumentHandler or CollectionHandler using method setDocumentClass. Remember that Your class must extend \ArangoDBClient\Document.

See the examples/customDocumentClass.php file for more details.

Log exceptions

The driver provides a simple logging mechanism that is turned off by default. If it is turned on, the driver logs all its exceptions using PHP's standard error_log mechanism. It calls PHP's error_log() function for this. It depends on the PHP configuration if and where exceptions are logged. Please consult your php.ini settings for further details.

To turn on exception logging in the driver, set a flag on the driver's Exception base class, from which all driver exceptions are subclassed:

To turn logging off, call its disableLogging method:

Put it all together

Here is the full code that combines all the pieces outlined above:

More information

• More example code, containing some code to create, delete and rename collections, is provided in the examples subdirectory that is provided with the library.

• PHPDoc documentation for the complete library