README

Resources act as a bridge between routes, models and requests.

The jam-resource module works with the mighty Jam ORM for Kohana 3.3

Main Features

Define resources in your bootstrap and routes for them would automatically be created
Generate urls from model objects or collections
Nest resources
Access the model object, the model collection or the parent object for the current request
Supports slugs with the sluggable behavior in Jam ORM
Restrict routes (and actions) to certain HTTP methods
Easily build a RESTful API

Defining resources

The simplest way to define a resource:

<?php
// Define the users resource
Resource::set('users');
?>

This would generate seven routes which would serve these purposes:

HTTP Verb	path	action	used for
GET	/users	index	display a list of all users
GET	/users/new	new	return an HTML form for creating a new user
POST	/users	create	create a new user
GET	/users/1	show	display a specific user
GET	/users/1/edit	edit	return an HTML form for editing a user
PUT	/users/1	update	update a specific user
DELETE	/users/1	destroy	delete a specific user

As you can see every action has a very specific purpose. Something you might not be used to in the PHP world. Everything is derived from Ruby on Rails routing.

You can easily limit the creation of these default routes or add more:

Only specific routes

<?php

Resource::set('users', array(
	'only' => array(
		'index',
		'show'
	)
));

Default routes except some

<?php

Resource::set('users', array(
	'except' => array(
		'destroy',
		'edit',
		'update'
	)
));

Adding additional routes

<?php

Resource::set('users', array(
	'with' => array(
		'picture',
		'collection' => array(
			'featured'
		)
	)
));

This would make accessible the following URLs (in addition to the default ones):

/users/1/picture
/users/featured

Of course you can use these options together to define those routes your application would need.

The routes which a resource would generate are separated in member routes and collection routes. The collection routes do not have a specific id while the member routes are about a specific resource.

As said above the resources act as a glue between routes, models and controllers.

The model, the controller and the URI paths are derived from the resource name.

The users resource would guess the controller is Controller_Users and the model is Model_User.

You can easily specify these explicitly:

<?php

Resource::set('photos', array(
	'controller' => 'pictures',
	'model' => 'image'
));

This would still create routes to access the photos on /photos and /photos/1. But it would use the actions in Controller_Pictures and the image model.

Changing the path string is achieved using the path option:

<?php

Resource::('users', array(
	'path' => 'people'
));

This would create routes for URIs like: /people, /people/1 etc. while still using the users controller and user model.

Accessing resources in controllers

When you visit /users the generated routes would open Controller_Users::action_index().

From there you would be able to access a Jam_Collections for the user model with:

$this->request->resource()->collection()

You could also access a Jam_Builder with:

$this->request->resource()->builder()

When you visit /users/1 the routes would open Controller_Users::action_show().

From there you could access the specified user model with:

$this->request->resource()->object()

There is no need to check if it is loaded. If there is no user model with the specified id Jam_Exception_Notfound would be thrown.

Generating URLs

You could also generate the resourceful URLs for a specific model or a collection.

Use the

<?php

// Jam_Model
$user = Jam::factory('user', 1);

// Jam_Collection
$users = Jam::query('user');

// /users/1
Resource::url($user);

// /users
Resource::url('users');

// /users
Resource::url($users);

// /users/1/edit
Resource::url($user, array('action' => 'edit'));

// /users
Resource::url('users', array('action' => 'create'));
?>

Child resources

TODO: explain child resources - defining, usage and application

Singular resources

TODO: explain what singular resources are and how they should be used

Sluggable

You could use the sluggable (TRUE|FALSE) option and the slug_regex to set up the routes to use slugs instead of primary keys.

TODO: explain sluggable implementation here

Formats

TODO: explain formats here

LICENSE

License

openbuildings / jam-resource

Maintainers

Details