Articulate: Concise

Articulate: Concise is a super lightweight data mapper ORM for Laravel. It exists as a package entirely because I wondered how lightweight of a solution I can build, that gives me the benefit of a data mapper ORM, without using a full ORM.

Concise is extensible and flexible, and will most likely serve as the basis for Articulate in the future, but it comes with many sensible defaults, and a sprinkle of magic that'll simplify using it based on certain conventions. It also comes with a driver for Laravel's auth functionality, and route entity binding (route model binding but for concise entities).

Getting Started

First things first, create yourself an entity.

php artisan make:entity Blog

By default, it is assumed that the entity...

• Is using an id field/column as its identifier
• Is using the default connection
• Has a table name that can be determined from the model name (blogs in this example)

To change any of these, you can provide the options --identity, --connection and --table respectively. This command will create two files...

• app/Entities/Blog.php
• app/Mappers/Entities/BlogMapper.php

Next you'll want to...

• Open up your new Blog class, add the fields as properties, and add some getters and setters, if you want.
• Open up your new BlogMapper class and update the toObject() and toData() methods.

Concise entities can also make use of implicit route "model" binding, so there's no need to worry about manually doing that. To get a repository for a given entity, you can use the EntityRepository contextual attribute, like so.

use Articulate\Concise\Attributes\EntityRepository;
use Articulate\Concise\Contracts\Repository;

class ExampleController {
    public function __construct(
        #[EntityRepository(Blog::class)] private Repository $blogRepository
    ) {}
}