Question

I recently started using Riak with PHP.

How exactly do I store JSON data?! Do I just push the JSON string into a Riak Object?!

The Riak PHP Client has the following for storing data:

require_once('riak-php-client/riak.php');

# Connect to Riak
$client = new RiakClient('127.0.0.1', 8098);

# Choose a bucket name
$bucket = $client->bucket('test');

# Supply a key under which to store your data
$person = $bucket->newObject('riak_developer_1', array(
    'name' => "John Smith",
    'age' => 28,
    'company' => "Facebook"
));

# Save the object to Riak
$person->store();

This takes the form of key-array data. So in the case of JSON, would it be like below?

# Supply a key under which to store your data
$person = $bucket->newObject('riak_developer_1', '{"name": "John Smith", "age": "28", "company": "Facebook"}';

I’m trying to find the best way to store data in the event that I need to use Riak’s Search feature. I’m also unsure if map-reduce works better/faster this way?!

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The array is already being converted to JSON in RiakObject->store() by default; you don’t have to do anything.

If you look at the PHP client source, you’ll see json_encode() is being used in the store() method when jsonize is TRUE (Which is the case when you use RiakBucket->newObject() ):
https://github.com/basho/riak-php-client/blob/master/riak.php#L1513

If you were to to do the following in your browser (after storing your array):

http://127.0.0.1:8098/riak/test/riak_developer_1

You’d get back:

{“name”: “John Smith”, “age”: 28, “company”: “Facebook”}

When you fetch the data back out of Riak using the PHP client it’s doing the reverse and you end up with your original PHP array.