Sulu Document Manager

The Sulu Document Manager is a layer which sits between the PHPCR repository and the application model. It provides a layer of domain abstraction on top of the raw PHPCR session, workspace, query manager, etc.

It is similar in concept to a typical ORM (for example Doctrine ORM) with some differences.

The following is an example:

<?php
// find a document in a specific locale and set a new title
$document = $documentManager->find('/cmf/contents/foobar', 'de');
$document->setTitle('Hello');

// persist the document then flush the changes
$documentManager->persist($document);
$documentManager->flush();

If you are familiar with Doctrine this will seem very familiar. There are some differences however:

  • Persist commits the changes to the node immediately, changes made to the document later on will not be taken into account on flush(). It is better to think of persist() as a function which prepares a snapshot of the current state of the document to be persisted.
  • The document manager is localization aware by default.

Some other things to note:

  • The Document Manager is 100% event based. This makes it very extensible, all of the functionality is provided by Event Subscribers.
  • Documents are defined with “Behavior” interfaces, which the event subscribers use to determine if and how the document should be handled.