PHP ActiveRecord - Version 1.0

We encourage pull requests, and issues will be dealt with thoroughly and in a timely manner.

This is a badly-needed relaunch of the project originally created by Kien La and Jacques Fuentes. Both authors and the current maintainers have lost interest in PHP, moved onto other languages, and no longer review pull requests or issues. Some of us still depend on the project and want to see it move forward, so we've moved it here under new ownership.

The code has been refreshed with a number of improvements:

A PSR-2 style checker has been added to the travis build, and a fixer has been run on the codebase. You can check your code locally with the command:
```
composer style-check
```
We've moved the minimum required version of PHP up to 5.4, which means our style checker is now enforcing short array syntax.
API and Usage documentation is now automatically generated and deployed to github pages. You'll find the usage documentation in /docs if you want to make any changes.

Note that the original website, http://www.phpactiverecord.org/, has also fallen into neglect and disrepair, and is not advised as a primary reference. A new documentation site has been launched here:

http://php-activerecord.github.io/activerecord/docs/Introduction.html

Introduction

A brief summarization of what ActiveRecord is:

Active record is an approach to access data in a database. A database table or view is wrapped into a class, thus an object instance is tied to a single row in the table. After creation of an object, a new row is added to the table upon save. Any object loaded gets its information from the database; when an object is updated, the corresponding row in the table is also updated. The wrapper class implements accessor methods or properties for each column in the table or view.

More details can be found here.

This implementation is inspired and thus borrows heavily from Ruby on Rails' ActiveRecord. We have tried to maintain their conventions while deviating mainly because of convenience or necessity. Of course, there are some differences which will be obvious to the user if they are familiar with rails.

Minimum Requirements

PHP 5.4+
PDO driver for your respective database

Supported Databases

MySQL
SQLite
PostgreSQL
Oracle

Features

Finder methods
Dynamic finder methods
Writer methods
Relationships
Validations
Callbacks
Serializations (json/xml)
Transactions
Support for multiple adapters
Miscellaneous options such as: aliased/protected/accessible attributes
Model Caching

Installation

Setup is very easy and straight-forward. There are essentially only three configuration points you must concern yourself with:

Setting the model autoload directory.
Configuring your database connections.
Setting the database connection to use for your environment.

Example:

ActiveRecord\Config::initialize(function($cfg)
{
   $cfg->set_model_directory('/path/to/your/model_directory');
   $cfg->set_connections(
     array(
       'development' => 'mysql://username:password@localhost/development_database_name',
       'test' => 'mysql://username:password@localhost/test_database_name',
       'production' => 'mysql://username:password@localhost/production_database_name'
     )
   );
});

Alternatively (w/o the 5.3 closure):

$cfg = ActiveRecord\Config::instance();
$cfg->set_model_directory('/path/to/your/model_directory');
$cfg->set_connections(
  array(
    'development' => 'mysql://username:password@localhost/development_database_name',
    'test' => 'mysql://username:password@localhost/test_database_name',
    'production' => 'mysql://username:password@localhost/production_database_name'
  )
);

PHP ActiveRecord will default to use your development database. For testing or production, you simply set the default connection according to your current environment ('test' or 'production'):

ActiveRecord\Config::initialize(function($cfg)
{
  $cfg->set_default_connection(your_environment);
});

Once you have configured these three settings you are done. ActiveRecord takes care of the rest for you. It does not require that you map your table schema to yaml/xml files. It will query the database for this information and cache it so that it does not make multiple calls to the database for a single schema.

Basic CRUD

Retrieve

These are your basic methods to find and retrieve records from your database. See the Finders section for more details.

$post = Post::find(1);
echo $post->title; # 'My first blog post!!'
echo $post->author_id; # 5

# also the same since it is the first record in the db
$post = Post::first();

# finding using dynamic finders
$post = Post::find_by_name('The Decider');
$post = Post::find_by_name_and_id('The Bridge Builder',100);
$post = Post::find_by_name_or_id('The Bridge Builder',100);

# finding using a conditions array
$posts = Post::find('all',array('conditions' => array('name=? or id > ?','The Bridge Builder',100)));

Create

Here we create a new post by instantiating a new object and then invoking the save() method.

$post = new Post();
$post->title = 'My first blog post!!';
$post->author_id = 5;
$post->save();
# INSERT INTO `posts` (title,author_id) VALUES('My first blog post!!', 5)

Update

To update you would just need to find a record first and then change one of its attributes. It keeps an array of attributes that are "dirty" (that have been modified) and so our sql will only update the fields modified.

$post = Post::find(1);
echo $post->title; # 'My first blog post!!'
$post->title = 'Some real title';
$post->save();
# UPDATE `posts` SET title='Some real title' WHERE id=1

$post->title = 'New real title';
$post->author_id = 1;
$post->save();
# UPDATE `posts` SET title='New real title', author_id=1 WHERE id=1

Delete

Deleting a record will not destroy the object. This means that it will call sql to delete the record in your database but you can still use the object if you need to.

$post = Post::find(1);
$post->delete();
# DELETE FROM `posts` WHERE id=1
echo $post->title; # 'New real title'

Contributing

Please refer to CONTRIBUTING.md for information on how to contribute to PHP ActiveRecord.

ryanjkelly/activerecord