Pudding

Pudding is an extension to popular ORM for Kohana - Jelly. It extends Jelly in the form of custom behaviors with many useful features:

• More Rails-ish deletion of relationship-dependent records and files,
• Few handy methods for query builder,
• Ability to generate text for Jelly_Field_Slug field from content of other field,
• Datetime field type,
• I18n support for models.

Features

I18n support for models

One of the major feature of Pudding is support for storing multilingual content in Jelly models. To enable 18n for field, use flag translate set to TRUE:

'name' => Jelly::field('string', array(
	'translate' => TRUE,
	...
)),

There also need to be created additional table in database to store translated text. Each model has to have separate table named the same as main table with _i18n suffix added at the end of name (eg. posts_i18n). Table schema should look like this:

CREATE TABLE `whatevers_i18n` (
  `record_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `lang_code` varchar(10) DEFAULT NULL,
  ...
  `name` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `content` text NOT NULL,
  ...
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

Two first fields (record_id and lang_code) are required for each *_18n table. They will store references to which record and language that translation refers. Other fields are model-specific and you should create table field for each field from model which will be translated. This means that translated fields are not needed in the main table and they can be easily removed. Main table should contain only the fields that were not marked 'translate' => TRUE.

Fetching translated data is simple. To get text for currently set language (based on lang set in I18n::lang()) use $object->field_name or $object->get('field_name') as usual. Getting text in specific language can be done by adding lang suffix to field name - $object->field_name_lang or $object->get('field_name_lang'). Examples:

I18n::lang('en');

// Getting text in default language (in that case English)
$object->name;
$object->get('name');

// Getting text in specific language
$object->name_pl;
$object->get('name_pl');

Ruby on Rails-like deletion of dependent records and files

You can already configure fields of Jelly model to delete all related records and files (eg. images associated with Jelly_Field_Image) when it is deleted. There's one drawback of this mechanism, though. It works only in case of deleting single model instance. So while removing collection (Jelly_Collection) of records that match a given condition, related data will not be deleted along with it. In order to do this, you need write your own loop and delete each record there. Pudding comes with more handy solution and detects whether there are set any dependencies and if so, deletes records in loop automaticaly.

You need to remember though, that in case of the loop solution, each of records will be deleted separately, which means separate SQL query. Keep that in mind when removing a larger number of records at a time.

To enable dependents deletion for relations and files use flag dependent set to TRUE:

'image' => Jelly::field('image', array(
	'path'      => 'path/to/images',
	'dependent' => TRUE,
	...
)),

And in case of relations:

'comments' => Jelly::field('hasmany', array(
	'dependent' => TRUE,
	...
)),

Generating slug from other field in model

Pudding makes it possible to automatically generate text for Jelly_Field_Slug field from content of other field, when the model is saved in database. To set from which field slug is to be generated, use source property setting source field name as value:

'title' => Jelly::field('string'),
'slug'  => Jelly::field('slug', array(
	'source' => 'title',
)),

Datetime field type

Maybe it's not a big deal, but I found it frustrating to have to set 'format' => 'Y-m-d H:i:s' for each declared timestamp field, which is to be store in database as DATETIME. Now, such fields can be defined much simpler:

'created_at' => Jelly::field('datetime'),

Datetime field type inherits from Jelly_Field_Timestamp, so every other properties works here as well.

Query builder methods

Pudding extends default Jelly query builder with few handy methods:

• ->by_field_name('value') - which is the shortcut form of ->where('field_name', '=', 'value');
• ->select_one($throw = TRUE) - returns single record matching given conditions. If there's no record found, by default HTTP_Exception_404 exception is thrown. You can change it by setting $throw parameter to FALSE;
• ->paginate($pagination_object) - to shorten amount of code written to paginate records, you can use this method passing previously defined Pagination object. Method requires Pagination object as its paramter.

More yummy?

There are other features which could be added to Pudding. One of them is polymorphic relationships. But that requires significant amount of time to develop, and for now remains a dream.