Planar

A super simple flat file json database / model

Throughout this readme, 'document' and 'collection' are used in the MongoDb sense.

Planar is a very basic flat file/nosql json database solution.

Planar is simple, fast, super-flexible, and probably very brittle. It's useful for small projects, where you have a relatively simple data structure, you don't need 1000s of documents and you only have a small amount of users with edit permissions.

It probably won't scale well, there's no collision detection or record locking, and will most likely slow to a crawl once your collections get really large, but I've used it in production apps with 100s of documents and had zero issues so far.

Planar creates json collections on the fly as needed, everything gets json encoded and stored in flat files. It is ORM-like, even though that's pretty much an irrelevant term since this is all json anyway, but you can do CRUD and simple queries on a 'model'-like object.

It backs up every change using diffs to make undos possible.

Disclaimer

It's still pretty alpha, could break at any time, and I might make backwards incompatible changes without any warning. Don't use it for anything too business critical. You have been warned.

Install

composer require moussaclarke\planar

Usage

Instantiation

At its simplest, you just extend the class to create your model/collection. It will use the class name (plural makes sense here) as the json collection name.

use MoussaClarke\Planar;

class Widgets extends Planar
{
    
}

You can then instantiate passing in a data folder location. The json and backup diff files will be stored in the folder you specify. If the json file doesn't exist yet, it will be created.

$widgets  = new Widgets('path/to/data/folder');

You can also set a data folder location by over-riding the datafolder property on the class.

protected $datafolder='path/to/data/folder';

You can then just do the following to instantiate:

$widgets = new Widgets;

You could set the data folder on a base model class, for example, which the concrete models extend.

Alternatively, if you need things to be slightly less tightly coupled, you can also inject both data folder and collection name without extending the Planar class.

$widgets = new Planar('path/to/data/folder', 'Widgets');

Schema

You can add a schema for the document if you like - Planar won't do anything to enforce it, and each document could in fact have completely different elements - but it might be useful elsewhere in your app to get a default instance of the data if you're trying to maintain a more rigid model structure, i.e. as a kind of configuration info. To do this, just over-ride the $schema property at the top of your model class.

protected $schema   = [
    'name' => ''
    'price' => '',
    'weight' => '',
    'subwidgets' => [],
];

Your initial property defaults would usually be an empty string or array, but you could also specify defaults. You can then grab your schema like this:

$schema = $widgets->getSchema();

It's up to you to then add or set it back to the collection once you've loaded the array with data.

If you need to use any runtime values to set defaults then over-ride the getSchema method instead.

public function getSchema()
{
    return [
        'name' => ''
        'price' => '',
        'weight' => '',
        'subwidgets' => [],
        'invoicedate' => date ('Y-m-d')
    ];
}

Creating & updating

You can create a document with add. Just pass in an array of data (which simply gets json encoded), it will return the unique id of the new document.

$data = [
    'name' => 'foobar',
    'price' => 5,
    'weight' => 10,
    'subwidget' => ['foo' => 'bar', 'bar' => 'foo']
];
$id = $widgets->add($data);

You don't need to worry about adding unique id or timestamp fields, those will be created and updated automatically. _id is simply a uniqid(), and _created and _modified are unix timestamps. Those three property names, all prefixed with _, are therefore reserved, so try not to have those in your data/schema.

If you know the id, you can replace a whole document with set. You can also use this to create a document with a specific id, although Planar won't warn you if it's over-writing anything.

$widgets->set('57d1d2fc97aee', $data);

Finding & Searching

Planar has various ways of finding and searching records, although doesn't really support any particularly sophisticated queries. find returns an array of documents where the named property has a particular value.

$result = $widgets->find('price', 5);

first returns the first document it finds where the named property has a particular value.

$result = $widgets->first('_id', '57d1d2fc97aee');

all returns the whole collection as an array, so you could perform more complicated queries on that.

$result = $widgets->all();

You can also sort the all results in ascending order by passing in a property name to sort by.

$result = $widgets->all('price');

search allows you to search for a term or phrase throughout the whole collection. It returns an array of documents where any property contains the value, and is case insensitive.

$result = $widgets->search('foo');

Deleting, Undoing & Restoring

You can delete a document if you know the id.

$widgets->delete('57d1d2fc97aee');

You can easily retrieve the previous version of a document at the last save point, in order to, for example, perform an undo, as long as the collection is persistent.

// get the previous version
$previous = $widgets->history('57d1d2fc97aee');
// undo i.e. set document to previous version 
$widgets->set('57d1d2fc97aee', $previous);

You can retrieve older versions by specifying the amount of steps to go back.

// get the version of the document three saves ago
$historical = $widgets->history('57d1d2fc97aee', 3);

While you can retrieve a deleted document with history, you can't set a document if it's been deleted. However you can restore a deleted document to its original id.

// delete the document
$widgets->delete('57d1d2fc97aee');
// and undelete it
$widgets->restore('57d1d2fc97aee');

Failing

Most of the methods above will return false on fail so you can check if your call was successful.

if ($widgets->delete('57d1d2fc97aee')) {
    echo 'Document succesfully deleted';
} else {
    echo 'Document not found';
}

Only the add method never returns false. As repeatedly mentioned, it will essentially json_encode any array you feed it, so doesn't really 'fail' as such, unless you don't send it an array. This has its own risks, so make sure the data you feed it isn't too weird!

Persistence

You might sometimes want non-persistent collections, for example you might want to instantiate an embedded model to scaffold out your UI, but it doesn't make sense for any data to persist within its own collection since that ultimately gets saved to the parent model/collection. For this use case, just over-ride the class $persists property and it will garbage collect once a day.

protected $persists = false;

Todo

• Retrieve historical state/undo
• Undelete
• Errors/Exceptions
• More granular set method, i.e. just one property rather than the whole document.
• Some better query/search options, e.g. Fuzzy search / regex
• Docblocks
• Slightly more verbose documentation with Daux.io, with clearer explanations and some longer examples
• Tests

Maintained

By Moussa Clarke

Contribute

Feel free to submit bug reports, suggestions and pull requests. Alternatively just fork it and make your own thing.

License

MIT