MANAGERS.md

Managers

Managers are responsible for the CRUD operations of Symphony objects such as Author, Entry, Field, Section, Page, Extension, EmailGateway, TextFormatter, DataSource and Event. Some managers only use the database as their storage while others use the disk. Hence, there are data managers (database) and resources managers (disk). Some managers even uses both storage facilities.

Data Managers

The data objects are Author, Entry, Field, Section, Page and Extension.

Data managers do not implement any specific interface, but they share common method signatures. Under the hood, they rely on Symphony::Database() to execute their statements. Writing to the database is done via the manipulations made on the objects directly and then calling commit() as usual.

Fetching is made easier by deprecating fetch() and implementing specialized DatabaseQuery classes. This allows for an infinite number of possible configurations and also make it possible to set default values, like the name of the table or a default sort. The specialized DatabaseQuery objects are created by calling the select() method.

$query = (new EntryManager)->select();

The specialized DatabaseQuery objects offer quick ways to filter and sort the data it is responsible for. This makes it even easier to use, since you do not have to remember (or know at all) the name of the columns.

$query = (new EntryManager)
            ->select()
            ->section(1)
            ->sort('system:creation-date');

These specialized DatabaseQuery objects also come with a specialized DatabaseQueryResult class. This make it easy to return fully constructed objects instead of plain rows from the database.

$entries = (new EntryManager)
            ->select()
            ->section(1)
            ->sort('system:creation-date')
            ->execute()
            ->rows();

To learn more about the database API, please read this document.

Resources Managers

The resource objects are Page, Extension, EmailGateway, TextFormatter, DataSource and Event.

Resource managers implement the FileResource interface, which provides a listAll() and create() methods. Writing new objects to the disk is specific to each manager.