CakePHP Domain Driven Design - Repository pattern

Part of the CakePHP Domain Driven Design Building Blocks suite.

Compatible with CakePHP 4.5 and CakePHP 5.

Key Objectives

• Ease creation of Repositories
• Conserves the power of CakePHP ORM
• Respect Layered architecture. This plugin takes place in the Infrastructure layer.
• Respect CakePHP conventions
• Applies CakePHP Convention over Configuration philosophy

Setup

Your entity must extends CakeDDD\Repository\Model\Entity\CakeEntity class. This maps (converts) CakePHP entities with your Domain entities. The CakeRepository takes care of this convertion.

Usage

Create a repository class, I would suggest in App\Model\Repository namespace. Implements your domain repository and extends with CakeRepository. No changes needed in your Table classes.

Entities

Extends your CakePHP entity with CakeDDD\Repository\Model\Entity\CakeEntity instead of Cake\ORM\Entity and declare toDomain and toRepository methods. To ease type auto-completion, you can add @extends CakeEntity<YourDomainEntityClassName> in head comments.

// App\Model\Entity

/**
 * @extends CakeEntity<YourDomainEntity>
 */
class YourEntity
    extends CakeDDD\Repository\Model\Entity\CakeEntity {
    // Usual CakePHP entity definition
    ...

    public static function toRepository(mixed $domainEntity): static {
        return new self([
            // Map CakePHP entity fields with domain entity properties
            'id' => $domainEntity->getId(),
            ...
        ]);
    }
    
    public function toDomain(): object
    {
        return new FakeEntity(
            // Map domain entity properties with CakePHP entity fields 
            $this->get('id')
            ...
        );
    }
}

Repositories

Create a repository class extending CakeRepository. To ease type auto-completion, you can add @extends CakeRepository<YourDomainEntityClassName> in head comments.

The Repository constructor requires the CakePHP alias table that will be retrieved with TableLocator.

 /**
  * @extends CakeRepository<YourDomainEntityClassName>
  */
class YourRepository
    extends CakeDDD\Repository\Model\Repository\CakeRepository
        implements YourDomainRepositoryInterface {
    public function __construct() {
        parent::__construct('App\Model\Table\YourCakePHPTable');
    }

    public function get(string $id): YourDomainEntity {
        return $this->query()->where('id' => $id)->first();
    }

    public function save(YourDomainEntity $domain): YourDomainEntity {
        return parent::persist($domain);
    }
    
    public function delete(YourDomainEntity $domain): bool {
        return parent::remove($domain);
    }
}

Method CakeRepository::query() converts CakePHP entities to domain entities.

Caveats

Your repository can not declare methods named persist nor remove as they are already declared in CakeRepository class. It is not allowed to override methods with varrying definitions.