Question

I have inherited a medium sized project that I would like to add an ORM to. I have checked out all the normal options Doctrine, Propel redbean , but they all seem to require me to pollute the business objects with their specific implementations. What I would really like (not sure if it is possible) is to pass my business object with its getters and setters etc and have the ORM persist the values. My main concern here is not tying the app to the ORM.

Answer 1

Consider Doctrine2. It doesn’t implement ActiveRecord (which, I think, you consider as a “pollution”), but instead a DataMapper pattern. You can configure Doctrine using annotations.

<?php
/** @Entity **/
class Post
{
    /** @Id @GeneratedValue @Column(type="integer") **/
    protected $id;
    /** @Column(type="string") **/
    protected $title;
    /** @Column(type="text") **/
    protected $body;
}

And then

<?php

use Doctrine\ORM\Tools\Setup;
use Doctrine\ORM\EntityManager;

require_once 'Doctrine/Common/ClassLoader.php';

$loader = new \Doctrine\Common\ClassLoader("Doctrine");
$loader->register();

$dbParams = array(
    'driver' => 'pdo_mysql',
    'user' => 'root',
    'password' => '',
    'dbname' => 'tests'
);
$path = 'path/to/entities';
$config = Setup::createAnnotationMetadataConfiguration($path, true);
$entityManager = EntityManager::create($dbParams, $config);
..................
$entityManager->persist($post);