Generating Resources

Generating HAL for Doctrine Entities

  • Since 1.3.0

Doctrine is a well-known and popular Object Relational Mapper; you will find it in use across pretty much every PHP framework. Mezzio is no different.

How do you generate HAL for Doctrine resources? As it turns out, the same way you would for any other objects you might have: create metadata mapping the objects you want to represent to the routes and the hydrators/collections to use when extracting them.

Example: Paginated Albums

In this example, we have an entity named Album that we want to expose via a paginated HAL representation. Over the course of the example, we will create a custom collection class based off of the Doctrine Paginator class, and map it as a HAL collection.

Our first step is defining an entity:

namespace Album\Entity;

use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;
use Ramsey\Uuid\Uuid;

/**
 * https://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-orm/en/2.6/reference/basic-mapping.html
 *
 * @ORM\Entity
 * @ORM\Table(name="albums")
 */
class Album
{
    /**
     * @var Uuid
     *
     * @ORM\Id
     * @ORM\Column(type="uuid", unique=true)
     * @ORM\GeneratedValue(strategy="CUSTOM")
     * @ORM\CustomIdGenerator(class="Ramsey\Uuid\Doctrine\UuidGenerator")
     */
    protected $id;

    /**
     * @ORM\Column(type="string", nullable=false)
     */
    protected $title;

    /**
     * @ORM\Column(type="datetime", nullable=false)
     */
    protected $created;

    /**
     * @ORM\Column(type="datetime")
     */
    protected $modified;

    /**
     * @return Uuid
     */
    public function getId(): Uuid
    {
        return $this->id;
    }

    /**
     * @return string
     */
    public function getTitle(): string
    {
        return $this->title;
    }

    /**
     * @param string $title
     */
    public function setTitle(string $title): void
    {
        $this->title = $title;
    }

    /**
     * @return \DateTime
     */
    public function getCreated(): \DateTime
    {
        return $this->created;
    }

    /**
     * @param \DateTime $created
     * @throws \Exception
     */
    public function setCreated(\DateTime $created = null): void
    {
        if (!$created && empty($this->getId())) {
            $this->created = new \DateTime("now");
        } else {
            $this->created = $created;
        }
    }

    /**
     * @return \DateTime
     */
    public function getModified(): \DateTime
    {
        return $this->modified;
    }

    /**
     * @param \DateTime $modified
     * @throws \Exception
     */
    public function setModified(\DateTime $modified = null): void
    {
        if (!$modified) {
            $this->modified = new \DateTime("now");
        } else {
            $this->modified = $modified;
        }
    }
}

In order to work with this, we need to provide Doctrine persistence mapping configuration. We will do this in the ConfigProvider for this module:

namespace Album;

use Doctrine\Common\Persistence\Mapping\Driver\MappingDriverChain;
use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping\Driver\AnnotationDriver;

class ConfigProvider
{
    public function __invoke() : array
    {
        return [
            'dependencies' => $this->getDependencies(),
            'doctrine'     => $this->getDoctrineEntities(),
        ];
    }

    public function getDependencies() : array
    {
        return [
        ];
    }

    public function getDoctrineEntities() : array
    {
        return [
            'driver' => [
                'orm_default' => [
                    'class' => MappingDriverChain::class,
                    'drivers' => [
                        'Album\Entity' => 'album_entity',
                    ],
                ],
                'album_entity' => [
                    'class' => AnnotationDriver::class,
                    'cache' => 'array',
                    'paths' => [__DIR__ . '/Entity'],
                ],
            ],
        ];
    }
}

Next, in order to provide a HAL collection representation, we will create a custom Doctrine\ORM\Tools\Pagination\Paginator extension:

namespace Album\Entity;

use Doctrine\ORM\Tools\Pagination\Paginator;

class AlbumCollection extends Paginator
{
}

From here, we will add configuration of our HAL metadata map to the ConfigProvider. First, we will add the following method to configure both our entity and our collection:

// Add these imports to the top of the class file
use Laminas\Hydrator\ReflectionHydrator;
use Mezzio\Hal\Metadata\RouteBasedCollectionMetadata;
use Mezzio\Hal\Metadata\RouteBasedResourceMetadata;

    // Add this method inside the ConfigProvider class:
    public function getHalMetadataMap()
    {
        return [
            [
                '__class__'      => RouteBasedResourceMetadata::class,
                'resource_class' => Entity\Album::class,
                'route'          => 'albums.show', // assumes a route named 'albums.show' has been created
                'extractor'      => ReflectionHydrator::class,
            ],
            [
                '__class__'           => RouteBasedCollectionMetadata::class,
                'collection_class'    => Entity\AlbumCollection::class,
                'collection_relation' => 'album',
                'route'               => 'albums.list', // assumes a route named 'albums.list' has been created
            ],
        ];
    }

Then, within the __invoke() method, we will assign the return value of that method to the key MetadataMap::class:

// Add this import to the top of the class file:
use Mezzio\Hal\Metadata\MetadataMap;

    // Modify this ConfigProvider method to read:
    public function __invoke() : array
    {
        return [
            'dependencies' => $this->getDependencies(),
            'templates'    => $this->getTemplates(),
            'doctrine'     => $this->getDoctrineEntities(),
            MetadataMap::class => $this->getHalMetadataMap(),
        ];
    }

With these in place, we can write a handler that will display a collection as follows:

namespace Album\Handler;

use Album\Entity\Album;
use Album\Entity\AlbumCollection;
use Doctrine\ORM\EntityManager;
use Mezzio\Hal\HalResponseFactory;
use Mezzio\Hal\ResourceGenerator;
use Psr\Http\Message\ResponseInterface;
use Psr\Http\Message\ServerRequestInterface;
use Psr\Http\Server\RequestHandlerInterface;

class ListAlbumsHandler implements RequestHandlerInterface
{
    protected $entityManager;
    protected $pageCount;
    protected $responseFactory;
    protected $resourceGenerator;

    public function __construct(
        EntityManager $entityManager,
        int $pageCount,
        HalResponseFactory $responseFactory,
        ResourceGenerator $resourceGenerator
    ) {
        $this->entityManager     = $entityManager;
        $this->pageCount         = $pageCount;
        $this->responseFactory   = $responseFactory;
        $this->resourceGenerator = $resourceGenerator;
    }

    public function handle(ServerRequestInterface $request) : ResponseInterface
    {
        $repository = $this->entityManager->getRepository(Album::class);

        $query = $repository
            ->createQueryBuilder('c')
            ->getQuery();
        $query->setMaxResults($this->pageCount);

        $paginator = new AlbumCollection($query);
        $resource  = $this->resourceGenerator->fromObject($paginator, $request);
        return $this->responseFactory->createResponse($request, $resource);
    }
}

And another handler for displaying an individual album:

namespace Album\Handler;

use Album\Entity\Album;
use Doctrine\ORM\EntityManager;
use Mezzio\Hal\HalResponseFactory;
use Mezzio\Hal\ResourceGenerator;
use Psr\Http\Message\ResponseInterface;
use Psr\Http\Message\ServerRequestInterface;
use Psr\Http\Server\RequestHandlerInterface;

class ShowAlbumHandler implements RequestHandlerInterface
{
    /** @var EntityManager */
    protected $entityManager;

    /** @var HalResponseFactory */
    protected $responseFactory;

    /** @var ResourceGenerator */
    protected $resourceGenerator;

    public function __construct(
        EntityManager $entityManager,
        HalResponseFactory $responseFactory,
        ResourceGenerator $resourceGenerator
    ) {
        $this->entityManager     = $entityManager;
        $this->responseFactory   = $responseFactory;
        $this->resourceGenerator = $resourceGenerator;
    }

    public function handle(ServerRequestInterface $request) : ResponseInterface
    {
        $entityRepository = $this->entityManager->getRepository(Album::class);

        $result = $entityRepository->find($request->getAttribute('id'));

        if (empty($result)) {
            throw new RuntimeException('Not Found', 404);
        }

        $resource = $this->resourceGenerator->fromObject($result, $request);
        return $this->responseFactory->createResponse($request, $resource);
    }
}

In the above example, we map our Album entity such that:

  • it is route-based; we will generate relational links to such entities based on existing routing definitions. (In this example, "albums.show".)
  • it uses the ReflectionHydrator from the laminas-hydrator package to extract a representation of the object to use with HAL.

For our AlbumCollection, we define it such that:

  • it, too, is route-based. (In this example, it maps to the route "albums.list".)
  • the collection will map to the property "album".

Since these mappings are in place, our handlers need only use the Doctrine EntityManager in order to retrieve the appropriate repository, and from there either retrieve appropriate entities (in the case of the ShowAlbumHandler), or seed a collection paginator (in the case of the ListAlbumsHandler). These values are known by the metadata map, and, as such, we can generate HAL resources for them without needing any other information.

Setting the offset

When you plan to use paginated Doctrine result sets, you DO NOT need to call $query->setFirstResult(). This will be called when generating the result set based on the current page and the value of $query->getMaxResults().

You MUST call $query->setMaxResults() prior to generating your resource if you want it to be paginated, however.

Example: Doctrine Collections

Sometimes we will want to return an entire collection at once. The getResult() method of Doctrine\ORM\Query will return an array of results by default, with each item in the array an object based on provided mappings.

mezzio-hal will not work with arrays by default, as it needs a typed object in order to appropriately map it to a representation. To accomplish this, then, we have several options:

  • Create a custom extension of an SPL iterator such as ArrayIterator to wrap the results.
  • Create a custom extension of something like Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection to wrap the results.

The following examples are based on the paginated collection from above; familiarize yourself with that code before continuing.

The first change we will make is to modify our AlbumCollection to extend the Doctrine ArrayCollection, instead of its Paginator:

namespace Album\Entity;

use Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection;

class AlbumCollection extends ArrayCollection
{
}

The only other changes we then need to make are to our ListAlbumsHandler:

    public function handle(ServerRequestInterface $request) : ResponseInterface
    {
        $repository = $this->entityManager->getRepository(Album::class);

        // Note that this removes the call to setMaxResults()
        $query = $repository
            ->createQueryBuilder('c')
            ->getQuery();

        // Note that we pass the collection class the query result, and not the
        // query instance:
        $collection = new AlbumCollection($query->getResult());

        $resource  = $this->resourceGenerator->fromObject($collection, $request);
        return $this->responseFactory->createResponse($request, $resource);
    }

With these in place, we will now get representation of all items returned by the query.