This Spark seamlessly integrates Doctrine2 ORM in CI2. Doctrine2 is a powerful ORM tool based on the DataMapper pattern that provides a database abstraction layer and an entities/document-based object-relational mapping library, together with a powerful command line tool that helps automating several different tasks. This spark contains both Doctrine2 library and the CLI tool, but in order to make it work you'll have to manually copy some files.

Installation and configuration

After installing this Spark, create a directory called proxies inside your application/models folder and make it writable:

$ cd /path/to/your/ci2/installation
$ mkdir ./application/models/proxies
$ chmod a+w ./application/models/proxies

You can use this Spark as usual by loading it in your controller:

$this->load->sparks('doctrine2');

// entity manager is loaded
$this->doctrine2->em(...);

In order to give a more comfortable access to the entity manager, you can use the following code:

$this->load->sparks('doctrine2');
$this->em = $this->doctrine2->em;

// your Entity Manager is now quickly available
$this->em(...);

To enable CLI tool, follow these instructions:

• Copy tools folder from Spark directory to your CI2 installation path (if you're using Sparks you should already have a tools directory in your installation path):

  $ cd /path/to/your/ci2/installation $ cp ./sparks/doctrine2//tools . -R

• Use the CLI tool from your tools directory:

  $ tools/doctrine COMMAND PARAMS

Remember that the entities in your model must reside in the application/models directory, while the generated proxies will be in application/models/proxies directory.

Known bugs and roadmap

There are no known bugs so far, but some features are missing in order to get to a "standard" application/libraries-based installation.

• Autoloading of Doctrine library doesn't work out of the box. You should manually load the Spark every time you need it. You might think aboutdoing such thing in your controller constructor, in order to avoid code duplication.
• You could think about implementing MY_Controller to extend standard controller and load the Entity Manager in every controller without explicitly loading the spark; I tried but this doesn't work, since MY_Loader (that is how sparks extends CI loading mechanism) is loaded after MY_Controller, so $this->load->spark() is unavailable at this stage. I also tried with a post_controller_constructor hook but: 1) something didn't work and 2) this is an awful workaround and the right way is to getting Sparks autoloading functionality to work as intended. This will therefore be addressed in a future release.
• I'd like to have the Entity Manager automatically available in all controllers via $this->em if Doctrine2 Spark is autoloaded, but I'll have to solve previous point, obviously.

If you're able to find a solution for the problems above, please contact me or send a pull request on GitHub project page: https://github.com/stickgrinder/doctrine2-spark

Resources and further readings:

• This work is largely based on WildlyInaccurate tutorial by Joseph Wynn: http://wildlyinaccurate.com/integrating-doctrine-2-with-codeigniter-2/ Follow this link to get a deep understanding of what and how.
• If you need a tighter integration bitween Doctrine2 and your CI2 codebase and you're too lazy to set it up by yourself, try this: http://www.tlswebsolutions.com/codeigniter-2-and-doctrine-2-integration-a-working-setup-doctrineignited/ I didn't try this package but used the checklist on the page to get a super-awesome CI2+D2+UhOh! integration. HTML5 boons in the package are cool also.
• Obviously, if you didn't do that already, head towards wonderful and well-written Doctrine2 ORM Documentation: http://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/orm/2.0/docs/en With such a doc, you won't have no excuses, so RTFM! >;)

Contacts and footnotes

This Spark has been "sponsored" by Agavee Team, written by Paolo Pustorino (hey, that's me! :) follow @stickgrinder tweets) and it's hosted on GitHub.

Thanks to Joseph Wynn for his clear tutorial, and thanks to all that will find (and fix!) bugs, send me nice twits and offer me some beer&pizza! :)