CRUD approach practice - zend-framework2

Question

Following many tutorials from official and non-official docs, there is no such a clear vision for common approach for creating editing the entity and updating just specific fields.
The main questions are:
1 - Create the entity - fill the form, validate, create entity object and populate it with exchangeArray and then save, in save method via docs we must configure an array from passed object like:
$data = array(
'artist' => $album->artist,
'title' => $album->title,
);
Can we avoid this array re-configuring in save method?
2 - Update the entity - same logic
3 - What if we want to update only one specific field?
I pass the array to updateEntity method, but is it normal way to pass object(and configure array inside method) to save method and pass array to update method?
4 - Almost same thing with 3 but issue now when we have an array with another keys among our entity fields keys, we can strip 'bad' array keys using hydrator and make something like array_intersect style, but what you suggest?

Answer 1

You can use a smart combination of your entity, form, input filter and hydrator to have almost no logic to get CRUD things done. For an admin interface I usually generate my controller, form and other classes. I use Sublime Text 2 and the snippets to generate these classes can be found in my repository.
This results in:
A controller with index (listing), view (single item), create, update and delete
A form to contain all entity fields
A repository (Doctrine) to query entities
A service to persist to the database (either create one, save one or delete one)
This will solve #1 and #2. Due to the way ZF2 filtering and hydration works, this will also solve #4 for you. Then, it is possible to set only a select no. of fields to be filtered, but I have not implemented that (yet). I can only refer to the manual to know how to do that.
If you want to know the implementation of above snippets, take a look at Soflomo\Portfolio which uses a similar strategy.

Answer 2

PHP, contrary to other languages, is array centric than object centric. Most task could be done via Array. In this case, instead of use
<?php
class SomeClass {
public $artist;
public $title;
}
$album=new SomeClass();
$data = array(
'artist' => $album->artist,
'title' => $album->title,
);
?>
We should use
<?
$SomeObject=array("artist"=>xxx,"title"=>xxxx);
$data = $someObject;
?>
i.e. we should avoid to use classes when we are referencing a POCO class and instead we should use the (less elegant) array. Otherwise, sometimes we will be forced to do such conversion between array and object.
Anyways i we will need to keep it as a object then, we can do the conversion between object to array using:
<?php
class SomeClass {
public $artist;
public $title;
}
$album=new SomeClass();
$data = (array)$album;
?>
However, this conversion sometimes is tricky.