Providers¶

Providers are the components used by a Briz application. if a provider is added to the system container it will be available everywhere in the application. in Briz Request and Response components are providers.since they should be available everywhere in the system they are added to the system container using config\providers.php file. everything in this file will be available inside container. the logger in this file is an external component called monolog

With Briz you can easily add providers. Briz is designed for easily adding any components into the system. i call it as “just use it strategy”. so you can use many external components easily.

Creating a Provider¶

Since there is no default model in Briz, I decided to add it first. it is the M in any MVC framework (Model View Controller). models are classes which should work with data. mainly they are used for communicating with database. since we dont have it by default, it is just VC. so to make it MVC we are adding a model.

there are two types of models which are widely used

Active Record.

Data mapper.

php-active-record and Eloquent are examples of active record type models. spot-2 and doctrine are examples of data mapper approch.

Both are good and have thier own advantages and disadvantages. you have to find it yourself. here i am going to add php active record as a provider in example.

Example¶

Here we are going to add php active record as a provider. so that we will have an active record model implementation ready to use. first find details about php active record from Php active record website . there is a quick start guide in that website. i am using the same connection code in that page bellow. but with few changes to pass arguments.

create a directory Providers inside MyApp. where we will store all our providrs. and create an file PhpAR.php in it.

<?php
namespace MyApp\Providers;

use Activerecord;

class PhpAR
{
    /**
     * @param string $root root directory
     * @param string $app user directory name
     */
    public static function register($root,$app)
    {
        $cfg = ActiveRecord\Config::instance();
        $cfg->set_model_directory($root.'/'.$app.'/Models');
        $cfg->set_connections(
            array(
                'development' => 'mysql://dev:dev@localhost/bridge',
                'test' => 'mysql://username:password@localhost/test_database_name',
                'production' => 'mysql://username:password@localhost/production_database_name'
            )
        );
        $cfg->set_default_connection('development');
    }
}

here we created a class PhpAR and a static method register in it. next we have to find what values from container are needed by this provider. here we will need to pass the location of the model directory. we have to store this value in MyApp/Models. currently MyApp directory is at /home/projects/briz so i will have to use /home/projects/briz/MyApp/Models as path to models. to get this path we have to pass root_dir and app from container. so we defined two parameters $root and $app for this function. the rest of the code is copy paste from the quick start at phpactiverecord website. you have to edit user name and password. visit phpactiverecord website for more details

for this we need to have php active record library available in our application. for this we can use composer.

$ composer require php-activerecord/php-activerecord

Now registering the provider, if you want to register this provider globally. you can use config/providers.php file. it will return an array containing providers to application initialization code which will add this to container. there is a format for adding content to this array.

NameSpace\Class@StaticMethod@argument@argument2

So, for our provider we will have to add "MyApp\Providers\PhpAR@register@root_dir@app" to this array. here MyApp\Providers\PhpAR is the class with namespace. and register is the static method and root_dir and app are parameters from container passed to this provider.

if you want it only available to a single controller. you can just load it inside that controller by passing arguments from container.