Custom Repositories

It is essential to be able to associate custom repository implementations to your entities. You are able to create any repository from scratch, especially for non SQL sources. However, the most common use case would be extending the default repository implementation to add custom selectors.

#Create Repository

To create a custom repository associated with a SQL data source simply extend the primary class Cycle\ORM\Select\Repository:

namespace Example\Repository;

class UserRepository extends \Cycle\ORM\Select\Repository
{

}

Use the entity annotation attribute to create the association:

namespace Example;

use Cycle\Annotated\Annotation as Cycle;

/**
 * @Cycle\Entity(repository="Example\Repository\UserRepository")
 */
class User
{
  // ...
}

This applies to the annotated extension only. Other schema declaration approaches will differ in implementation.

You can also specify the repository name using a relative namespace path:

namespace Example;

use Cycle\Annotated\Annotation as Cycle;

/**
 * @Cycle\Entity(repository="Repository\UserRepository")
 */
class User
{
  // ...
}

Update/calculate your schema to get access to the newly assigned repository through the getRepository method of the orm:

print_r(get_class($orm->getRepository(\Example\User::class)));

You can assign a single repository implementation to multiple entities.

#Custom Selects

The main reason for using custom repositories is the ability to write your own find methods. You can do that using base select method which returns you the instance of Cycle\ORM\Select:

namespace Example\Repository;

use Cycle\ORM\Select;

class UserRepository extends Select\Repository
{
    public function findActive(): Select
    {
        return $this->select()->where('status', 'active');
    }
}

You can also chain your select methods $this->findActive()->where('age', '>', $age); as long as you return the Select object from your method.

Now you can access this method:

print_r($orm->getRepository(\Example\User::class)->findActive()->fetchAll());

#Preloading relations

Another use-case is to automatically pre-load some of the entity relations using a custom find method:

use Cycle\ORM\Select;

class UserRepository extends Select\Repository
{
    // ...

    public function findActiveUsersLoadAddress(): Select
    {
        return $this->findActive()->load('address');
    }
}