Download the PHP package xsolve-pl/model-factory without Composer

Table of contents

• Introduction
• License
• Getting started
• Usage examples
  • Implementing model factory
  • Using external dependencies in model
  • Grouping model factories into collections
  • Creating nested models

Introduction

This library provides a versatile skeleton for organizing model factories.

It can be used to provide objects that will be later on passed to some serializer and returned via API, or some adapters or facades for your objects before they are handed over to some other libraries or bundles.

It aims to empower models so that they can easily get access to some services or create nested models lazily without requiring much work upfront.

If you want to use this library in a Symfony application you may be interested in using the dedicated bundle available at xsolve-pl/model-factory-bundle.

License

This library is under the MIT license. See the complete license in LICENSE file.

Getting started

Include this library in your project using Composer as follows (assuming it is installed globally):

For more information on Composer see its Introduction.

Usage examples

Implementing model factory

This library defines a simple interface for model factory that provides information about whether it supports given object (i.e. is able to produce model object appropriate for given object) and instantiate such model object. It also include convenient methods allowing to operate on multiple objects at once. See Xsolve\ModelFactory\ModelFactory\ModelFactoryInterface for more details.

One you are free to implement this interface with your own model factory classes, a basic abstract class for model factory is included as well in Xsolve\ModelFactory\ModelFactory\ModelFactory. It includes all the necessary logic and leaves out only a public supportsObject method and a protected instantiateModel method to be implemented. Using it as a base class creating a new model factory class becomes very easy:

Using external dependencies in model

There are cases where some external dependency is required in model object to return some value. Simple example would be having an model object representing a package for which volumetric weight needs to be calculated (which results from multiplying its volume by some coefficient specific for each shipment company). A helper class calculating such value would usually be defined as a service in DI container, with coefficient provided via some config files or fetched from some data storage.

With this library it is extremely easy to gain access to such services in model object by utilizing Xsolve\ModelFactory\ModelFactory\ModelFactoryAwareModelInterface. If Xsolve\ModelFactory\ModelFactory\ModelFactory was used as a base class for your model factory class, then every model implementing aforementioned interface will be injected with model factory that was used to produce it. Since model factories can be defined as services themselves, they can be injected with any service from DI container and can expose public proxy methods for model objects to access them.

Following example presents sample usage of this interface. First we define model factory class:

Our model class would look as follows (note that Xsolve\ModelFactory\ModelFactory\ModelFactoryAwareModelTrait is used here to provide convenient setModelFactory and getModelFactory methods):

Grouping model factories into collections

To make it easy to produce models for multiple objects it is possible to group model factories into collections. If your application provides multiple API (or multiple API versions that are so different that they utilize completely different models) you are able to group factories in separate collections and avoid the risk of producing incorrect models.

Basic implementation of model factory collection is provided in Xsolve\ModelFactory\ModelFactoryCollection\ModelFactoryCollection class. It allows to register multiple model factories via its 'addModelFactory` method and provides same interface as a single model factory, so that it is completely interchangable. Its methods attempt to find appropriate model factory for each object provided.

This snippet defines one model factory collections $modelFactoryCollection and two model factories $fooModelFactory and $bazModelFactory which are added to the collection.

Afterwards it is possible to call createModel method (as well as other methods characteristic for model factories) on the collection and model will be created as long as there is one and only one model factory supporting given object.

Creating nested models

In some cases the models you would like to produce can contain other models (e.g. produced for objects associated with the root object). If this nesting is deep (as it may be for some APIs optimized for SPA applications that aim to reduce number of requests required to fetch data) it becomes tedious to build all models upfront and connect them in a proper way. An easier solution is to empower models to be able to produce nested models on their own via the same model factory collection that was used to instantiate themselves.

To achieve this your model may implement Xsolve\ModelFactory\ModelFactoryCollection\ModelFactoryCollectionAwareModelInterface which will result in model factory collection that was used to create the model to be injected to it. The basic implementation of this interface is provided in Xsolve\ModelFactory\ModelFactoryCollection\ModelFactoryCollectionAwareModelTrait.

Let's assume that previously presented Example\Foo class object contains a property containing an array of Example\Baz class objects and we want this association to be carried to model objects as well. If both Example\FooModelFactory and Example\BazModelFactory are a part of the same model factory collection and instances of Example\FooModel class are instantiated via collection's createModel or createModels methods of this collection, implementation of Example\FooModel class could look as follows:

Of course if Example\BazModel implements the same interface it will also be injected with the same model factory collection and will be able to produce models for nested objects - it's as easy as that!