1. Features
2. What's Still Not Working?

Even though I am actively using this on production sites this extension is in extreme beta - expect maybe a bug or two

You can find the repository here: https://github.com/Sammaye/mongoyii2

This is a set of tools and add-ons built on top of Yii2's own MongoDB extension to further it's capacity and abilities because I found the default MongoDB extension lacked a lot of features needed in programs I made using MongoDB.

Features ¶

Formatter ¶

The formatter, which replaces Yii2's own, provides some standard representations of objects, especially MongoDates.

To use it simply add:

'formatter' => ['class' => 'sammaye\mongoyii\Formatter']

to the components section in your configuration file, for example, in common/config/main.php.

After you have added it you can define certain fields as data types. Let's take an example of defining a GridView's columns property:

'columns' => [
	'_id',
	'url',
	[
		'attribute' => 'date',
		'format' => 'date'
	],
	'inc_id',
	[
		'attribute' => 'updated_at',
		'format' => 'date'
	],
	[
		'attribute' => 'created_at',
		'format' => 'date'
	],
	[
		'class' => 'yii\grid\ActionColumn',
		'template' => '{update} {delete}',
		'urlCreator' => function($action, $model, $key, $index){
			$params = is_array($key) ? $key : ['id' => (string) $key];
			$params[0] = 'comic-strip' . '/' . $action;
			return Url::toRoute($params);
		}
	]
]

The date formats will use the formatter class you included for this extension to ensure that the correct output is used.

Validators ¶

The most common way to include the validators is to include sammaye\mongoyii\ActiveRecord instead of yii\mongodb\ActiveRecord within your models.

You can also use all validators directly by calling the class, for example:

new sammaye\mongoyii\NumberValidator()

or:

['field', 'sammaye\mongoyii\NumberValidator'],

The main change in the validators is that they actually change the model's value.

This behaviour is because MongoDB is not type aware within it's own server environment unlike technologies like SQL where you can shove a string into an int field and it will automatically and magically convert. To complicate things MongoDB IS type aware in it's querying and you can only query by the exact same types as what is in the document.

So most validators are based upon the principle of making it easy to format (as well as validate) the return ready for input into MongoDB.

Validator Map ¶

MongoYii2 contains it's own validator map when you include the ActiveRecord. This is, currently, what the extra validators look like:

public static $builtInValidators = [
	'id' => 'sammaye\mongoyii\validators\MongoIdValidator',
	'date' => 'sammaye\mongoyii\validators\MongoDateValidator',
	'in' => 'sammaye\mongoyii\validators\RangeValidator',
	'inInt' => [
		'class' => 'sammaye\mongoyii\validators\RangeValidator',
		'format' => 'int'
	],
	'integer' => [
		'class' => 'sammaye\mongoyii\validators\NumberValidator',
		'integerOnly' => true,
		'format' => 'int'
	],
	'float' => [
		'class' => 'sammaye\mongoyii\validators\NumberValidator',
		'format' => 'float'
	],
	'array' => 'sammaye\mongoyii\validators\ArrayValidator',
	'number' => 'sammaye\mongoyii\validators\NumberValidator',
];

Array Validator ¶

This is designed to allow you to validate very basic subdocuments, simple 1-dimensional arrays. You can use it like:

[
	'array_field',
	'array',
	'max' => 10,
	'rules' =>
		[
			['$', 'intInt', 'range' => array_keys($this->rangeVals())],
		]
],

Essentially there are 4 properties you need to know about for this validator:

• min which defines a minimum number of elements within the array
• max which does the opposite
• required which defines a required field
• rules which defines the rules for the array.

All defined rules have the same structure:

['$', rule_name, params],

The $ is always used to denote all elements of the array, currently you cannot target elements directly, for example:

[1, rule_name, params],

This validator will currently batch all errors for the field the same as Yii2 standard does for a single field.

MongoDate Validator ¶

Does exactly the same as Yii2's own DateValidator except it can also cast to a MongoDate object if the cast property is true, which it is by default.

MongoId Validator ¶

This checks to see if the value is a MongoId and tries to cast it if you have not set the cast property to false.

NumberValidator ¶

Checks if value is a number and will format it if you fill in format property. It can take an anon function for the format property or int, float, string or nothing. Nothing will result in nothing being done to the value. Example model rules entry:

['int_field', 'Number', 'integerOnly' => true, 'format' => 'int']

This validator can also be called by:

• integer
• float

These are used as shortcuts for calling the NumberValidator with format filled in as either int or float.

RangeValidator ¶

Checks if all values are in a range of other values and will format the range if you fill in the format property. It can take an anon function for the format property or int, float, string or nothing. Nothing will result in nothing being done to the value.

This validator can also be called by inInt which is a shortcut for calling ['intRange', 'in', 'range' => [1,2,3], 'format' => 'int'].

Active Query Changes ¶

The active query now has the ability to not only stream, via each(), but also get the raw cursor back:

User::find()->where(['cheese' => 'cheddar'])->raw()->info(); // gets cursor info

each() will get the cursor and, one by one, instantiate the rows as models, using the cursors own batch methods to pull from MongoDB in your configured batchSize() (normally 100 rows at a time) instead of using the all() or nothing method.

This is especially helpful for large scripts where you could easily run out of memory.

Indexer ¶

The indexer allows you to add indexes to MongoDB from your models.

Currently it will not manage the indexes for you, dropping of indexes is either all or none in the script and you need to use the mongo console to do it individually.

To use it simply copy it to your console controller folder, whether it be console/controllers or commands and edit the first line of the file to change it's namespace and then simply run it: php ./yii index/build.

It will tell you what it is doing and what indexes it adds. It will search through your models folder and search for any models with the indexes() function. Upon reading that function's return it will make indexes for that model.

A good example of a model's indexes function is:

public function indexes()
{
	return [
		// db.c.ensureIndex({email: 1,status: 1})
		['email' => 1, 'status' => 1],
		
		// db.c.ensureIndex({email: 1}, {unique: true, sparse: true})
		[['email' => 1], ['unique' => true, 'sparse' => true]],
		
		// db.c.ensureIndex({username: 1}, {unique: true, sparse: true})
		[['username' => 1], ['unique' => true, 'sparse' => true]],
		
		// db.c.ensureIndex({status: 1})
		['status' => 1],
		
		// db.c.ensureIndex({password_reset_token: 1,status: 1})
		['password_reset_token' => 1, 'status' => 1],
		
		// db.c.ensureIndex({_id: 1,status: 1})
		['_id' => 1, 'status' => 1],
		
		// db.c.ensureIndex({facebook_id: -1})
		['facebook_id' => -1],
		
		// db.c.ensureIndex({google_id: -1})
		['google_id' => -1],
	];
}

Mongo Helper ¶

Contains some helpful functions which I just had to share:

• Geo coordinates function so you can get distances within your PHP code too
• MongoDB DATE() function to get dates from MongoDate objects

What's Still Not Working? ¶

Object subdocuments do not work still. So a document of the structure:

{
	somefield: {
		{d: 1, e: 2},
		...
	}
}

will not work automatically with this extension.

I thought about it long and hard but everything I came up with kept needing changes so it could be used differently for each scenario and case I had.

In the end I just ditched what I had and moved on. I added some thoughts on this thread if someone wants to take it up.

Apart from that most of this extension is about making stuff work.