This module provides a way to populate a database from YAML fixtures and custom classes. For instance, when a building a web application the pages and default objects can be defined in YAML and shared around developers. This extends the requireDefaultRecords concept in SilverStripe's DataModel.

• Will Rossiter (wilr, will.rossiter@dna.co.nz)

• SilverStripe 3+ framework

We normally just use Populate during the development phase of the project. After the project is live you may wish to remove the module from the repo.

composer require "dnadesign/silverstripe-populate:dev-master"

In your application mysite/_config.yml file, specify the YAML fixtures you want to load.

Populate:
  include_yaml_fixtures:
    - 'app/fixtures/populate.yml'

If you're sharing test setup with populate, you can specify any number of paths to load fixtures from.

An example populate.yml might look like the following:

Page:
	home:
		Title: "Home"
		Content: "My Home Page"
		ParentID: 0

Out of the box, the records will be created on when you run the PopulateTask through /dev/tasks/PopulateTask/. To make it completely transparent to developers during the application build, you can also include this to hook in on requireDefaultRecords as part of dev/build by including the following in one of your application models requireDefaultRecords methods:

public function requireDefaultRecords() {
	parent::requireDefaultRecords();

	Populate::requireRecords();
}

include_yaml_fixtures

An array of YAML files to parse.

mysite/_config/app.yml

Populate:
  include_yaml_fixtures:
    - 'app/fixtures/populate.yml'

truncate_objects

An array of ClassName's whose instances are to be removed from the database prior to importing. Useful to prevent multiple copies of populated content from being imported. You should truncate any objects you create.

mysite/_config/app.yml

Populate:
  truncate_objects:
    - Page
    - Member

Truncating will automatically clear subclasses and versions. However it will not clear versions. You may need to describe any additional relation tables.

mysite/_config/app.yml

Populate:
  truncate_objects:
    - Page
    - Member
    - Member_RelatedPages

See Updating Records if you wish to merge new and old records rather than clearing all of them.

Populate uses the same FixtureFactory setup as SilverStripe's unit testing framework. The basic structure of which is:

ClassName:
  somereference:
  	FieldName: "Value"

Relations are handled by referring to them by their reference value:

Member:
  admin:
    Email: "admin@site.com"

Page:
  homepage:
    Author: =>Member.admin

Any object which implements the Versioned extension will be automatically published.

Basic PHP operations can also be included in the YAML file. Any line that is wrapped in a ` character and ends with a semi colon will be evaled in the current scope of the importer.

Page:
  mythankyoupage:
    ThankYouText: `Page::config()->thank_you_text`;
    LinkedPage: `sprintf("[Page](%s)", HelpPage::get()->first()->Link())`;

If you do not truncate the entire table, the module will attempt to first look up an existing record and update that existing record. For this to happen the YAML must declare the fields to match in the look up. You can use several options for this.

Contains a WHERE clause to match e.g "URLSegment = 'home' AND ParentID = 0".

HomePage:
  home:
    Title: "My awesome homepage"
    PopulateMergeWhen: "URLSegment = 'home' AND ParentID = 0"

Takes a list of fields defined in the YAML and matches them based on the database to avoid repeating content

HomePage:
  home:
  	Title: "My awesome homepage"
  	URLSegment: 'home'
  	ParentID: 0
  	PopulateMergeMatch:
  	  - URLSegment
  	  - ParentID

Takes the first record in the database and merges with that. This option is suitable for things like SiteConfig where you normally only contain a single record.

SiteConfig:
  mysiteconfig:
  	Tagline: "SilverStripe is awesome"
  	PopulateMergeAny: true

If the criteria meets more than 1 instance, all instances bar the first are removed from the database so ensure you criteria is specific enough to get the unique field value.

The script also handles creating default File and image records through the PopulateFileFrom flag. This copies the file from another path (say mysite) and puts the file inside your assets folder.

Image:
  lgoptimusl3ii:
    Filename: assets/shop/lgoptimusl3ii.png
    PopulateFileFrom: app/images/demo/large.png

Product:
  lgoptimus:
    ProductImage: =>Image.lgoptimusl3ii

The module also provides extensions that can be opted into depending on your project needs

This extension outputs the result of the Populate::requireDefaultRecords() as a SQL Dump on your local machine. This speeds up the process if using Populate as part of a test suite or some other CI service as instead of manually calling the task (which will use the ORM) your test case can be fed raw MySQL to import and hopefully speed up execution times.

To apply the extension add it to Populate, configure the path, flush, then run dev/tasks/PopulateTask

PopulateMySQLExportExtension:
  export_db_path: ~/path.sql

Populate:
  extensions
    - PopulateMySQLExportExtension