PHP Framework for better Business Logic design and scalable database access.
Using Agile Data inside your PHP app allows you to abstract database (SQL or NoSQL) access without loosing access to power-features (grouping, aggregating, sub-queries, custom expressions, cross-vendor references, entity-level joins).
You will be able to separate your business logic from schema domain, so that the rest of your application could use expressions, imported fields and aggregate columns transparently.
Agile Data also offers you to implement enterprise-focused features such as ACL, Audit, Undo, Scopes as well as transparently change database vendor for your entity storage.
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ORM/Active Record is not only designed for relational databases. There are too much potential that ORM abstracts. The way how modern ORM get around it by offering ability to generate "Query-in-progress" object off your model which you can tweak.
Agile Data significantly expands amount of interactions you can do between Model and Query Builder. You can generate update/delete queries, aggregate queries and drop them into Query Builder:
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In Agile Data your field can be defined through user-defined SQL expression. That does not affect the rest of the API, the field can still be used inside actions, conditions and inside your CRUD operations with a model. Most expressions are read-only though.
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Have you felt that something is broken with Eager/Lazy loading approach? With Agile Data you'll never have to use it again. If you have a reference between models, you can "import" fields through this relationship.
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References are like relations in SQL database except that they are defined between your Models. And because models are defined in "domain model" same goes for the References.
In this short example, I have defined "ActiveProjects" reference that can be used to address
non-cancelled projects of a client. More importantly my aggregate field total_budget that
is built using this reference automatically includes my new condition when it builds the
sub-query.
With most frameworks when it comes to serious data aggregation your only selection is to design and execute raw SQL queries. Agile Data stays with you all the way. How do we create an efficient query to display total budget from all the projects grouped by client's country while entirely remaining in domain model?
Did you notice that the amount excluded cancelled projects even though we never asked so explicitly?
Most ORMs can define define models that only work with a single SQL table. If you have to store logical entity data into multiple tables - tough luck, you'll have to do some linking yourself.
Agile Data allow you to define multiple joins right inside your model. As you join() another table, you will be able to import fields from the joined table. If you create a new record, data will automatically be distributed into the tables and records will be linked up correctly.
Probably one of the best feature of Agile Data is deep traversal. Remember how your ORM tried to implement varous many-to-many relationships? This is no longer a problem in Agile Data.
Suppose you want to look at all the countries that have 2-letter name. How many projects are there from the clients that are located in a country with 2-letter name?
Agile Data can answer with a query or with a result.
The examples you saw so far are only a small fragment of the possibilities you can achieve with Agile Data. You now have a new playground where you can design your business logic around the advanced database features.
One of the virtues we value the most in Agile Data is ability to abstract and add higher level features on our solid foundation.
You now have a domain-level and persistence-level hooks. With a domain-level ones (afterLoad, beforeSave) you get to operate with your field data before or after operation
On other hand you can utilise persistence-level hooks ('beforeUpdateQuery', 'beforeSelectQuery') and you can interact with a powerful Query Builder to add a few SQL options (insert ignore or calc_found_rows) if you need.
And guess what - should your model be saved into NoSQL database, the domain-level hooks will be executed, but SQL-specific ones will not.
Most ORMs hard-code features like soft-delete, audit-log, timestamps. In Agile Data the implementation of base model is incredibly lightweight and all the necessary features are added through external objects.
We are still working on our Extension library but we plan to include:
- Audit Log - record all operations in a model (as well as previous field values)
- Undo - revert last few few operations on your model.
- ACL - flexible system to restrict access to certain records, fields or models based on permissions of your logged-in user or custom logic.
- Filestore - allow you to work with files inside your model. Files are actually stored in S3 (or other) but the references and meta-information remains in the database.
- Soft-Delete, purge and undelete - several strategies, custom fields, permissions.
If you are interested in early access to Extensions, please contact us at http://agiletoolkit.org/contact
If you wonder how those advanced features may impact performance of loading and saving data, there is another pleasant surprise. Loading, saving, iterating and deleting records do not create new in-memory objects:
foreach($client->ref('Project') as $project) {
echo $project->get('name')."\n"
}
// $project refers to same object at all times, but $project's active data
// is re-populated on each iteration.Nothing unnecessary is pre-fetched. Only requested columns are queried. Rows are streamed and never ever we will try to squeeze a large collection of IDs into a query!
Agile Data works fast even if you have huge amount of records in the database.
When ORM promise you "security" they don't really extend it to the cases where you wish to perform a sub-query of a sort. Then you have to deal with RAW query components and glue them together yourself.
Agile Data provides a universal support for Expressions and each expression
have supports for escaping and parameters;
$c->addCondition($c->expr('length([name]) = []', [2]))This is condition from our deep-traversal demo, where our custom condition fetches only 2-character long countries. Compare that to the generated query segment:
where length(`name`) = :aFirst of all - [name] is automatically mapped into SQL representation of
your name field (in case it's field from a join or a sub-query). Secondly
the number 2 is supplied as PDO parameter. And Agile Data takes extra
care to join parameters between different expressions that make it into
your query.
The final security measure are the Conditions. Once you load your Client, traversing into 'Project' model will imply a condition which will only expose projects of that specific Client.
Even if you perform a multi-row opetation such as action('update')
or action('delete') it will only apply to projects of that client.
With the model object you won't be able to create a new project that
does NOT belong to loaded client.
Those security measures are there to protect you against human factor.
If you have missed link to documentation, then its agile-data.readthedocs.io.
Update your composer.json with 'require' and 'autoload' sections:
{
"type":"project",
"require":{
"atk4/data": "^1.0.0",
"psy/psysh": "*"
},
"autoload":{
"psr-4": {
"my\\": "src/my/"
}
}
}Run composer update and create your first business model inside src/my/Model_User.php:
namespace my;
class Model_User extends \atk4\data\Model
{
public $table = 'user';
function init()
{
parent::init();
$this->addFields(['email','name','password']);
}
}Use an existing table name and fields. Next create console.php file to start exploring Agile Data:
<?php
include'vendor/autoload.php';
$db = \atk4\data\Persistence::connect(PDO_DSN, USER, PASS);
$m = new my\Model_User($db);
eval(\Psy\sh());Finally, run console.php:
$ php console.php
Now you can explore. Try typing:
> $m
> $m->loadBy('email', 'example@example.com')
> $m->get()
> $m->export(['email','name'])
> $m->action('count')
> $m->action('count')->getOne()Agile Data is part of Agile Toolkit - PHP UI Framework. If you like this project, you should also look into:
- DSQL -
- Agile Core -
We wish to take on your feedback and improve Agile Data further. Here is how you can connect with developer team:
- chat with us on Gitter and ask your questions directly.
- ask or post suggestions on our forum https://forum.agiletoolkit.org
- share Agile Data with your friends, we need more people to use it. Blog. Tweet. Share.
- work on some of the tickets marked with help wanted tag.
See www.agiletoolkit.org for more frameworks and libraries that can make your PHP Web Application even more efficient.
Follow pull-request history and activity of repository to see what's going on.
1.1 Add support for derived models (unions).
1.x Add support for 3rd party vendor implementations.
1.x Add support for MongoDB.
1.x Add support and docs for Validators.
- 20 Jul: Release of 1.0 with a new QuickStart guide
- 15 Jul: Rewrote README preparing for our first BETA release
- 05 Jul: Released 0.5 Expressions, Conditions, Relations
- 28 Jun: Released 0.4 join support for SQL and Array
- 24 Jun: Released 0.3 with general improvements
- 17 Jun: Finally shipping 0.2: With good starting support of SQL and Array
- 29 May: Finished implementation of core logic for Business Model
- 11 May: Released 0.1: Implemented code climate, test coverage and travis
- 06 May: Revamped the concept, updated video and made it simpler
- 22 Apr: Finalized concept, created presentation slides.
- 17 Apr: Started working on concept draft (in wiki)
- 14 Apr: Posted my concept on Reddit