Lithium: How to manually populate a DocumentSet? - php

Question

How can I return data from an external source as a DocumentSet?
I set up a custom data source to interface with Amazon's Product Advertising API. To do this, I subclassed lithium\data\source\Http and redefined the read method to suit my needs as described in the documentation (http://li3.me/docs/manual/working-with-data/creating-data-sources.wiki).
However, my lithium version (0.11, last release) does not seem to have a cast method like in the example and if I create one it won't get called when I do return $this->item($model, $data, $options).
So, I made a custom item function to create the Documents by calling parent::item just like the documentation example does for cast.
Then, after the recursive calls, I end up with an array of Document objects and the final call to parent::item then gives me an empty DocumentSet object.
How should I pass the data on to create a proper DocumentSet?
Here's a minimal example of my code:
// Within class Amazon extends \lithium\data\source\Http
protected function _init() {
// Define entity classes.
$this->_classes += array(
'entity' => 'lithium\data\entity\Document',
'set' => 'lithium\data\collection\DocumentSet'
);
parent::_init();
}
public function read($query, array $options = array()) {
// Extract from query object.
$parameters = $query->export($this, array('keys' => array('conditions')));
$conditions = $parameters['conditions'];
// Code stripped to validate conditions and prepare Amazon request (that part works).
// results in a $queryString variable.
// Get response from Server.
$xml = simplexml_load_string($this->connection->get($this->_config['basePath'], $queryString));
// Stripped response validation and reformatting -> $items contains an array of SimpleXMLElement objects.
return $this->item($query->model(), $items, array('class' => 'set'));
}
public function item($model, array $data = array(), array $options = array()) {
// Recursively create Documents for arrays.
foreach($data as $key => $value) {
if(is_array($value)) {
$data[$key] = $this->item($model, $value, array('class' => 'entity'));
}
else if(is_object($value) && get_class($value) == "SimpleXMLElement") {
// Stripped code to extract data from XML object and put it in array $docData.
$data[$key] = $this->item($model, $docData, array('class' => 'entity'));
}
}
// Works perfectly for every (recursive) call with $options['class'] == 'entity' but fails for the final call with $options['class'] == 'set' (for this final call $data contains an array of Document objects).
return parent::item($model, $data, $options);
}

Answer 1

I would track the master branch instead of the release versions.
In your case, since you're boxing your objects manually, I would do something like:
return $this->_instance('set', compact('data'));