05-architecture.md

1. Getting Started
2. Obtaining OAuth Tokens For Patrons
3. Patreon Integration Examples
4. Method Documentation
5. Library Architecture

Resources, Entities and Collections

This library is designed to be easy to work with and easy to understand if you wish to learn how it works under the hood. Take a look at the src/Patreon directory to see the Entities and Resources that make up the library, and check out tests/Patreon to see examples of how the various methods can be used.

Entities

Entities are objects with properties that are populated from Patreon responses. Each Entity has defined properties which you can depend on existing (with a null value). Additionally, Entities expose helper methods that allow your application not to concern itself with making determinations about Entity states, e.g: $reward->isAvailableToChoose() and $pledge->hasMadeAPayment().

You can browse the properties of each Entity via their class files:

• Address
• Campaign
• Goal
• Pledge
• Reward
• User

Resources

Resources represent Patreon API endpoints. Each Resource exposes methods for fetching data from these endpoints. Each Resource can be accessed through the Patreon client, e.g: $patreon->resource()->method().

• campaigns provides getMyCampaign, getMyCampaignWithPledges, getCampaign and getCampaignWithPledges
• me provides get
• pledges provides getCampaignPledges and getPageOfCampaignPledges

Additionally, the webhook resource provides an accept method which will verify the signature of a Webhook received from Patreon and return the Pledge Entity.

Collections

When there is more than one Entity a Collection is given, Collections "[...] provide a fluent, convenient wrapper for working with arrays of data". This makes it very easy to work with groups of Entities and extract, transform or manage their properties. For example:

$patreon = new Patreon('access_token');
$campaign = $patreon->campaigns()->getMyCampaignWithPledges();

// echo a list of each patron's full_name
$campaign->pledges->each(function ($pledge) {
    echo "{$pledge->patron->full_name}\n";
});

// extract each patron's email address
$emails = $campaign->pledges->map(function ($pledge) {
    return $pledge->patron->email;
});

// get all Pledges of at least $50
$pledges = $campaign->pledges->where('amount_cents', '>=', 5000);

As a general pointer, when working this library you should never need to use while or foreach loops.

Next Steps

• Contribute!
• Get help!