FLightModel - Light Yii2 style active record for Yii

Active record gives very convenient way of DB communication. However, active record is not as fast as query builder. Due to some benchmarks query builder 3x faster than active record.

FLightModel extends CDbCommand class and adds active record style methods. Those methods are highly inspired by Yii2's active record. Note that FLightModel is mainly intended for data retrieving, it does not have save() method.

FLightModel provides the following methods to retrieve the query results:

• one($condition): returns a single record populated with the first row of data.
• all($condition): returns all records based on the query results.
• count($condition): returns the number of records.
• exists($condition): returns a value indicating whether the query result has data or not.
• with($methods): list of relations that this query should be performed with.
• indexBy($column): the name of the column by which the query result should be indexed.
• asArray(): whether to return each record as an array.

Usage: Let's say we have table posts

class Post extends FLightModel
{
     public static function tableName()
     {
         return 'posts';
     }
     
     // if primary key is different than id, we should override this method
     public static function primaryKey()
     {
         return 'code';
     }
}

FLightModel instances are usually created by FLightModel::find() or FLightModel::findAll() or FLightModel::findOne().

// fetch all rows as array of stdClass objects
Post::findAll();

// equivalent to above     
Post::find()->all()

// fetch all active posts
Post::findAll('active' => 1);

// equivalent to above    
Post::find()->all('active' => 1);

// equivalent to above  
Post::find()->where('active=:value', array(':value'=>1))->all();

// fetch all active posts with comments     
Post::find()->with('comments')->all('active' => 1);      

Class Post must have relation method comments

public function comments()
{
     $this->comments = Comment::findAll(['post_id' => $this->pk]);
}

Relation method may have params

Post::find()->with(['comments' => [$a, $b]])->all('active' => 1);

// also loads users
Post::find()->with(['comments' => [$a, $b], 'users'])->all('active' => 1);

// fetch result as array   
Post::find()->with('comments')->asArray()->all('active' => 1);   

By default, light model returns results as stdClass object or array of stdClass objects. Calling asArray() makes the result an array, but this does not apply to result of relation methods. In order to correct this, one must:

public function comments()
{
     $this->comments = Comment::find()->
         setFetchMode($this->getFetchMode())->
         all(['post_id' => $this->pk]);
}

There is afterFind() method which enables us to call custom methods after finding the result. Its calling syntax is same as with(). Let's say our post table is multilingual and has name_en, name_uz fields. We want to have virtual field name indicating current language version of name.

Post::find()->with('comments')->with('user')->afterFind('langs')->all();
...
public function langs()
{
     $this->name = $this->{'name_' . Yii::app()->language};
} 

Some more examples:

// fetch one row whose id is 8
Post::findOne(8);

// same as above        
Post::find()->one(8);
     
Post::findOne(['active' => 1, 'code' => 8]);

Post::exists(['user_id' => Yii::app()->user->id]);

// fetch post whose id in 7 or 8 or 9
Post::findAll(['code' => [7,8,9]]);  

// number of all posts
Post::count();

// number of all inactive posts           
Post::count('active' => 0);