How do you work with complex documents returned as arrays?

[crazycodr]

I'm trying out your library with a simple model that contains arrays of values such as:

public function __construct()
{
    $this['night'] = null;
    $this['received'] = array(
        'date' => date('Y-m-d G:i'),
        'by' => null
    );
    $this['client'] = array(
        'name' => null,
        'givenname' => null
    );
}

Which works fine in itself, if i can place values in the object, i'm able to save them correctly to Mongodb and it looks something like the following and it's perfect.

{
    "_id" : ObjectId("529f905b45f3b0203f90b053"),
    "night" : "529f8a6645f3b0293f979d28",
    "received" : {
        "date" : "2013-12-04 21:22",
        "by" : "Mathieu Dumoulin"
    },
    "client" : {
        "name" : "Champoux",
        "givenname" : "Valérie"
    }
}

But the problem is, when i comes back, i have arrays instead of objects. This forces me to redraw the code to use arrays instead of objects and the resulting issue is i keep getting "Indirect modification of overloaded element of Transport has no effect" exceptions because i'm trying to change a value of a returned array with is not a reference type, so the assign just ends up in the void and doesn't change anything.

Used to be and worked fine in the beginning:

$transport = new Transport();
$transport->received->date = Input::get('received_date');
$transport->received->by = Input::get('received_by');
$transport->client->name = Input::get('client_name');
$transport->client->givenname = Input::get('client_givenname');

Currently needs to be because mongo returns arrays in eloquent model:

$transport = new Transport();
$transport['received']['date'] = Input::get('received_date');
$transport['received']['by'] = Input::get('received_by');
$transport['client']['name'] = Input::get('client_name');
$transport['client']['givenname'] = Input::get('client_givenname');

Needs to be if i want to not get the exception:

$transport = new Transport();
$transport['received'] = array(
    'date' => Input::get('received_date'),
    'by' => Input::get('received_by'),
);
$transport['client'] = array(
    'name' => Input::get('client_name'),
    'givenname' => Input::get('client_givenname'),
);

I hope you agree that this last code i pasted smells a lot, it's ugly, hard to manage and hard to upgrade in the future. I'm used to doing my own repository classes and hydrators, but i want to take advantage of Eloquent in this project even though i'm using MongoDB.

So my question is, what is your approach to this problem?

[jenssegers]

This is a known issue with PHP's mongo driver. I can't really do anything about it without a big impact on the performance. This was also mentioned in #65.

But this should be possible:

$transport = new Transport();
$transport->received = array(
    'date' => Input::get('received_date'),
    'by' => Input::get('received_by'),
);
$transport->client = array(
    'name' => Input::get('client_name'),
    'givenname' => Input::get('client_givenname'),
);

[crazycodr]

I'll see if it could be simple to actually scan the arrays and transform them in objects but put an option in the driver to achieve so. Would you agree on accepting a PR if i found how to do it?

[jenssegers]

I have been thinking about the same thing, but I fear it would be bad for performance on big collections because you would have to recursively scan each document.

[crazycodr]

As long as it's toggleable as an option, i don't see an issue, else i'll just have to move away from the laravel querybuilder and make my own data access layer. Not that hard, but just annoying to have to do so!

[jenssegers]

You map always send me possible solutions, preferably with benchmark results :)

[m-nel]

Disclaimer: just started looking into MongoDB, have not used either Laravel-MongoDB or Mongolid.

That said, have you had a look at https://github.com/Zizaco/mongolid-laravel ?
Specifically, the relationships:
Docs - https://github.com/Zizaco/mongolid-laravel#relationships
Code - https://github.com/Zizaco/mongolid/blob/master/src/Zizaco/Mongolid/Model.php#L580

[jenssegers]

Now working on embedsMany relations: https://github.com/jenssegers/Laravel-MongoDB#embedsmany-relations

[ifeltsweet]

Would really like to have this implemented as well.