Models

Models in Tempest are objects that represent the data and functionality of your application. Thanks to Tempest's map function, models can be as simple as an object, and their data could be coming from anywhere.

final class Book
{
    #[Length(min: 1, max: 120)]
    public string $title;

    public ?Author $author = null;

    /** @var \App\Modules\Books\Models\Chapter[] */
    public array $chapters = [];
}

Database models

Since most models are persisted within a database though, Tempest provides a trait called BaseModel (note: this trait will probably be renamed soon). Using this trait will make it so that your model classes can be persisted from and to a database.

Such model classes look like this:

final class Book implements Model
{
    use BaseModel;

    #[Length(min: 1, max: 120)]
    public string $title;

    public ?Author $author = null;

    /** @var \App\Modules\Books\Models\Chapter[] */
    public array $chapters = [];
}

Some key things to note about model definition:

• Tempest relies as much as possible on PHP's type system to handle its data mapping. For example: loading a book from the database with its author; Tempest knows which tables to query because of the relation to the Author model.
• You can add additional data validation rules using attributes. One example is the #[Length] attribute. There'll be a dedicated chapter about validation in the future.
• PHP unfortunately doesn't support typed collections, which means that Tempest relies on docblock definitions to define has many relations.
• The Model interface defines a set of methods that makes it easy to retrieve and persist models. It's important to note that the model class itself isn't concerned with SQL-specific query builders.

Querying