Item lists

Item lists are groups of Item objects retrieved from the database.

Working with Items becomes a lot more powerful when in conjunction with Item lists. Items allows you to retrieve multiple Items at once from the database and work with them as you would do with a regular list.

Just like when creating single Item classes, Item lists are App classes that extend the Cherrycake's Items core class. Let's say we want to create an Item list class to work with lists of movies. To do so, so we create the Movies class in the file /classes/Movies.class.php, and it looks like this:

<?php

namespace CherrycakeApp;

class Movies extends \Cherrycake\Items {
    protected $tableName = "movies";
    protected $itemClassName = "\CherrycakeApp\Movie";
}

Just by setting these two properties we'll have a working Movies class:

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

• itemClassName The name of the Item class.

You can also set some other properties if you need to change the defaults:

• databaseProviderName The database provider name where this items are stored. Defaults to main

We're now ready to start retrieving Movie lists from the database. Let's see how we could simply get a list of all the movies on the database:

$movies = new Movies([
    "fillMethod" => "fromParameters",
    "p" => []
]);
echo "{$movies->count()} Movies found";

30 Movies found

You can automatically fill your Movies object with Movie items when creating it by passing the fillMethod key as you see in the example above.

Since we're not specifying any parameters in the p key, we'll simply get all movies in the database at once.

See this example working in the Cherrycake documentation examples site.

Let's see how we could iterate through the results to show all the movie titles and their release years:

foreach ($movies as $movie)
    echo "{$movie->title} ({$movie->year})\n";

Alien (1979)
The Thing (1982)
Silent Running (1972)
Arrival (2016)
Interstellar (2014)
Ex Machina (2014)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
The Martian (2015)
Planet of the Apes (1968)
Moon (2009)
Contact (1997)
The Man from Earth (2007)
Dune (1984)
Blade Runner (1982)
Brainstorm (1983)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005)
Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
Prometheus (2012)
The Last Starfighter (1984)
Enemy Mine (1985)
Explorers (1985)
Tron (1982)
WarGames (1983)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
The War of the Worlds (1953)
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
The Abyss (1989)
War of the Worlds (2005)
Super 8 (2011)

See this example working in the Cherrycake documentation examples site.

Limit results

To get only the first n results instead of all of them, you can specify the limit key when creating your Movies object, like this:

$movies = new Movies([
    "fillMethod" => "fromParameters",
    "p" => [
        "limit" => 3
    ]
]);

foreach ($movies as $movie)
    echo "{$movie->title} ({$movie->year})\n";

Alien (1979)
The Thing (1982)
Silent Running (1972)

Results pagination

There's also a simple way of paginating results by specifying the itemsPerPage and page keys. Let's say you're dividing your movie listing in pages containing five movies each, and you want to get the third page. You would do it like this:

$movies = new Movies([
    "fillMethod" => "fromParameters",
    "p" => [
        "isPaging" => true,
        "itemsPerPage" => 5,
        "page" => 2
    ]
]);

foreach ($movies as $movie)
    echo "{$movie->title} ({$movie->year})\n";

Contact (1997)
The Man from Earth (2007)
Dune (1984)
Blade Runner (1982)
Brainstorm (1983)

Remember that pages start at zero, not at 1.

Iterating Items in a pattern

Since we already learned how to pass variables to a pattern, why don't we pass the $movies object to a pattern, and iterate it there to create a nice <UL> list? This is how it can be done:

We output the pattern using the Patterns::out method, passing the $movies variable along:

$movies = new Movies([
    "fillMethod" => "fromParameters",
    "limit" => 5
]);

$e->Patterns->out("MoviesList.html", [
    "variables" => [
        "movies" => $movies
    ]
]);

We create the pattern MoviesList.html like this:

<html><body>

<ul>
    <?php foreach ($movies as $movie) { ?>
        <li><?=$movie->title?> (<?=$movie->year?>)</li>
    <?php } ?>
</ul>

</body></html>

And this is the result:

Browser

• Alien (1979)

• The Thing (1982)

• Silent Running (1972)

• Arrival (2016)

• Interstellar (2014)

See this example working in the Cherrycake documentation examples site.