Extending / Storage Layer / Hydration & Persistence

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Overview¶

To provide flexibility within Bolt's different field types there needs to be two sub-processes that happen when data is converted between data rows and PHP objects and in reverse when committing PHP objects to the storage layer.

Throughout the documentation these processes will be referred to as Hydration and Persistence. Hydration occurs when data from the storage layer is converted into PHP objects, and in the reverse situation when a PHP object is passed to the storage layer conversions will happen in the opposite direction.

As a simple example take the following entity operation.

$content->setDatepublish = new \DateTime('2016-01-01 09:00');
$repo->save($content);

In this example the value of datepublish is set to a PHP object so before this gets passed to the storage layer it needs to be converted to a database value.

Inversely when we do a fetch from the database, for example we can expect the following:

$content = $repo->find(1);
$date = $content->getDatepublish(); // returns \DateTime instance