Extending Bolt / Doctrine Entities (managing content)

Read more about this topic in Doctrine's official documentation: Doctrine ORM.

What are Entities?¶

Entities are, simply put, PHP objects that allow CRUD (create-read-update-delete) operations with the database.

Thinking of traditional SQL databases, you can think of an Entity as a row in a table in the database.

The entity class serves two purposes:

1. Define the columns and properties of the table in the database (i.e., what fields does it store)
2. A PHP object, store the data for a specific instance (row)

For example, a very basic entity can be defined as a Product:

<?php

class Product
{
    /**
     * @var int
     */
    private $id;
    /**
     * @var string
     */
    private $name;
}

What Entities does Bolt provide?¶

Bolt contains a number of entities:

How to create your own Entity?¶

You can add Entities directly in the src/Entity/ directory of your project.

For example, let's create a new Field type color, which will be an entity.

In src/Entity/ create a class ColorField.php:

<?php

declare(strict_types=1);

namespace App\Color;

use Bolt\Entity\Field;
use Bolt\Entity\Field\Excerptable;
use Bolt\Entity\Field\RawPersistable;
use Bolt\Entity\FieldInterface;
use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;
use OzdemirBurak\Iris\Color\Hex;

/**
 * @ORM\Entity
 */
class ColorField extends Field implements Excerptable, FieldInterface, RawPersistable
{
    public const TYPE = 'color';

    public function getValue(): ?array
    {
        $value = parent::getValue();

        if (empty($value)) {
            return [];
        }

        $color = new Hex($value[0]);

        return [$color];
    }
}

Then, make sure the entity is properly mapped by Doctrine, by adding to your services.yaml:

### Map entities
doctrine:
  orm:
    auto_generate_proxy_classes: '%kernel.debug%'
    naming_strategy: doctrine.orm.naming_strategy.underscore
    auto_mapping: true
    mappings:
      Color:
        is_bundle: false
        type: annotation
        dir: '%kernel.project_dir%/src/Entity/ColorField'
        prefix: 'App\Color'
        alias: Color