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:

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)

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();