POC for ORM "Content Repository"

[Daniel Leech]

Hi all,

For the past 4/5 days I have been working on a POC for a Doctrine ORM
"Content Repository" - that is a wrapper that allows you to access
Doctrine ORM Entities as if they were stored in a tree:

https://github.com/dantleech/doctrine-cr

The motivation behind this is to :

- Provide less of a barrier to people "wanting to add CMS functionality
to their existing apps".
- Use the CMF tree-like components (menu, tree browser) with the
Doctrine ORM.
- Allow easier integration with third-party tools (e.g. integration with
Sylius / Sonata would require a lot less specialization).

The current approach is quite simple:

- Decorate the EntityManager (currently adding a `move` method and
dispatching a few events).
- Intercept find() and perform a look up in a "path" table to determine
the class FQN of the target entity, forward to real EM.
- All "managed" objects must (currently) use a UUID (automatically
assigned) as their primary key - this primary key is the same as that
of the row entries in the path table.
- As with Jackalope-Doctrine-Dbal there is an operation queue which is
flushed when the EM is flushed, so we do not get any "order of
operation" issues as with the PHPCR-ODM.

It currently "works"[1] and supports:

- Mapping "parent", "children", "path", "depth", etc. via. an XML
driver.
- Persisting, Updating, Removal.
- Moving: implicit (setting the parent) and explicit
($em->move($srcPath, $destPath))

Some ideas for the future:

- Provide a PHPCR API - browse/modify the "Content Repository" with the PHPCR
Shell (using restrictive node types based on the Class FQNs).
- Support Mongo DB etc - provide something even more analagous to
PHPCR-ODM.
- Support for hierarchical queries in the query builder.
- Support FK relationship between path table and target "entity" table
(one column per relationship).

As for performance, I did some benchmarks comparing against the
PHPCR-ODM - I dare to say that they can be improved:

suite: 1339ff93fe7abf1496b925d952b4b7551761c006, date: 2016-05-05, stime: 22:45:19
+------------------+-------------+---------------+-------------+----------+
| Benchmark | Create tree | find() single | Remove tree | Move |
+------------------+-------------+---------------+-------------+----------+
| PhpcrOdmBench | 128.594ms | 26.757ms | 25.773ms | 27.857ms |
| DoctrineCrBench | 167.484ms | 21.900ms | 38.961ms | 18.935ms |
| DoctrineOrmBench | | 7.770ms | | |
+------------------+-------------+---------------+-------------+----------+

Note: that Doctrine ORM is only hydrating a single field compared to
multiple fields for the other two, which may account for its drastic
advantage, also DoctrineCr uses 2 paths to move, where the PhpcrOdm
requires an Entity + a path.

So, there it is - its just an idea, next I will try and write a bundle
and integrate it with f.e. the ResourceRest component so that it can use
the TreeBrowser.

And if this proves to be a success it should find a place to live
(guessing Doctrine would be the best place).

What do you think?

Dan

[1] "works": It has been written quickly and it is lacking much test
coverage.

[David Buchmann]

hi dan,

interesting. how does this compare to
https://github.com/Atlantic18/DoctrineExtensions/blob/master/doc/tree.md ?

if its different enough to the doctrine extensions, we can push for it
to become part of doctrine or provide it for the cmf.

cheers,david

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[Daniel Leech]

On Mon, May 09, 2016 at 09:00:45AM +0200, David Buchmann wrote:
> hi dan,
>
> interesting. how does this compare to
> https://github.com/Atlantic18/DoctrineExtensions/blob/master/doc/tree.md ?
>
> if its different enough to the doctrine extensions, we can push for it
> to become part of doctrine or provide it for the cmf.

- It covers multiple tables, as with the PHPCR-ODM, each node/entity can
be of a different class.
- It uses paths and UUID identifiers.

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[Lukas Kahwe Smith]

> On 09 May 2016, at 10:22, Daniel Leech <dan...@dantleech.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, May 09, 2016 at 09:00:45AM +0200, David Buchmann wrote:
>> hi dan,
>>
>> interesting. how does this compare to
>> https://github.com/Atlantic18/DoctrineExtensions/blob/master/doc/tree.md ?
>>
>> if its different enough to the doctrine extensions, we can push for it
>> to become part of doctrine or provide it for the cmf.
>
> - It covers multiple tables, as with the PHPCR-ODM, each node/entity can
> be of a different class.
> - It uses paths and UUID identifiers.

an interesting alternative approach to create an “ODM” on top of the “ORM” would be looking at the Neos CMS CR .. it is fairly similar to PHPCR and is also build on top of the Doctrine ORM.

regards,
Lukas Kahwe Smith
sm...@pooteeweet.org