README

Formica allows to easily use the builder pattern in your projects e.g. to setup your test data.

Installation

Formica can be easily installed by running composer require dkplus/formica.

Quick start

Lets assume that you have a class Acme\Issue for which you want to have a builder for. It has some properties and can be constructed through a named constructor.

namespace Acme;

class Issue
{
    // …
    
    public static function bug(string $id, string $title, string $text): self
    {
        // …    
    }
    
    // …
}

For a builder you need another class Acme\IssueBuilder which extends the base builder:

namespace Acme;

use Dkplus\Formica\Builder;

/**
 * @method IssueBuilder withTitle(string $title)
 * @method IssueBuilder withText(string $text)
 */
class IssueBuilder extends Builder
{
    public static function aBug()
    {
        return new self([
            '74738ff5-5367-5958-9aee-98fffdcd1876',
            'title' => 'It does not work',
            'text' => 'A long error text',
        ], 'bug');
    }
}

You can use the builder like this:

$issue = IssueBuilder::aBug()->withTitle('Another title')->build();

Explanations

The Dkplus\Formica\Builder expects three arguments:

• The default arguments that should be passed to the constructing method.
• The name of the static method that should be used to construct the object. If null is given it will use the constructor of the object.
• The class of the object. If null is given it will try to guess the class by using the class of the builder and stripping the last 7 characters. So if you name your builders <NameOfYourClass>Builder you don't need to pass the class.

While the constructor of Dkplus\Formica\Builder is public, I advise to create a static method that calls it and sets the default values.

All arguments that have been given with a key can be overriden by one of withX() or andX() methods (both providing a fluent interface).

If you want some autocompletion I suggest to put some annotations on top of your builder (see the example above).