Items guide

Using Items in your Cherrycake application brings you many benefits when interacting with the primordial objects of your app, like optimized loading, storage, caching and embedded security mechanisms.

Items are Cherrycake's conceptualization of the fundamental objects stored in a database. For example, in an e-commerce site, a product would be an Item, but also would a user, a product category or an invoice.

Creating an Item class

Items always come from a database table, so let's imagine we have a database of movies and we want to define an Item to work with the movies that are stored in our database, in a table called movies with the following fields:

Field name	Specs
id	unsigned int auto_increment primary key	The unique id to identify movies.
title	varchar	The name of the movie.
summary	text	A summary of the movie plot.
year	year	The year the movie was released.
dateAdded	datetime	The date and time the movie was added to the database.
directorId	unsigned int	The id of the director in the directors table.

You can get an SQL script to create this table in the Cherrycake documentation examples repository, in the /install/database/movies.sql file.

Items are App classes that extend the Cherrycake's Item core class, so we create the Movie class in the file /classes/Movie.class.php, and it looks like this:

<?php

namespace CherrycakeApp;

class Movie extends \Cherrycake\Item {
    protected $tableName = "movies";
    protected $fields = [
        "id" => [
            "type" => \Cherrycake\DATABASE_FIELD_TYPE_INTEGER
        ],
        "title" => [
            "type" => \Cherrycake\DATABASE_FIELD_TYPE_STRING
        ],
        "summary" => [
            "type" => \Cherrycake\DATABASE_FIELD_TYPE_TEXT
        ],
        "year" => [
            "type" => \Cherrycake\DATABASE_FIELD_TYPE_YEAR
        ],
        "imdbRating" => [
            "type" => \Cherrycake\DATABASE_FIELD_TYPE_FLOAT
        ]
    ];
}

We set some properties of the class to configure it:

• tableName The name of the table where the items are stored.

• fields A hash array to specify the field names and field types of the table. See Database constants for all the available field types. See Item::$fields for more keys you can use here to customize how your Item works.

You can also set this other properties if you'll be using values different from the defaults:

• databaseProviderName The database provider name where this items are stored. The default is main

• idFieldName The name of the field that contains values to uniquely identify each item in the table. Defaults to id

With this we've already created a functional Item that can now represent a movie in our app with the added benefits of using Cherrycake Items.

Now, what can you do with your new Movie class? Let's see how to create a Movie object we can manipulate. Let's say we want to load the movie with id 15:

$movie = new Movie([
    "loadMethod" => "fromId",
    "id" => 15
]);

Field values for an Item are accessed just like regular properties, like this:

echo "{$movie->title} ({$movie->year})";

Brainstorm (1983)

See this example working in the Cherrycake documentation examples site.

We can also update items on the database by using Item::update, for example:

$movie->update([
    "imdbRating" => 8.7
]);

Changing an Item's property manually and then calling Item::update without any parameters also works. This will do the same as the example above:

$movie->imdbRating = 8.7;
$movie->update();

To remove an item from the database, use the Item::delete method:

$movie->delete();