Use Symfony2 to create template/skeleton code

Pre-requisite: A lamp environment, i will be using a vagrant lamp box (scotch-box) i created earlier.

To understand Symfony2 there is nothing better than getting ones hands dirty. We will try to use doctrine to build models, create views using twig and maybe use a dash of frontend magic using backbone or something similar.

For the test project I chose a sales bundle where we will make models for item, item type and sale.

Using symfony2 command line to create a model.

Because i have used vagrant scotch-box to provision my dev environment, i need to first make sure i do vagrant up to start the VM. then i do vagrant ssh this will take me to the ssh

locate where you have symfony installed, in my case it is /var/www/public/sandbox and give the following command:

php app/console generate:bundle

pick a name any name....well not actually, we need to be following coding standards set out in the symfony guide to ensure we name our bundle like this Bundle, so in my case i didn't have a vendor, so i chose a project name in this case it was Test\SandboxBundle, the bundle was named TestSandboxBundle and relevant files were created for me.

I just chose the defaults and had symfony create all it deemed good and wholesome...this will be additionally helpful if we peep under the hood as to what and where things are normally stored.

Now our bundle is created, we can create some models so in the symfony root in my case /var/www/public/sandbox i type the following command in order to generate the entities.

Entities we need: We are attempting to create a pos system, so we will have the following models:

ItemType - Types of item eg. Toys, Bakery, Drinks etc
  Id, Name (string:50) & Description (string: 250)

Item - The item, this will linked with item type
  Id, ItemTypeId (int), Name (string:50), Description (string:250), Price (descimal), Opening Stock (int)

Sale - the actual sale which will link to the item.
  Id, Date (date time), ItemId (int), Quantity(int), CustomerId(int)

Customer - the customer, to make things easier, we will create only 2 customers 1 pos & the other for WEB orders.
  Id(int), Name (string:50), Address (string:250), postcode (string:12)

So we generate these models one by one, the options i have chosen are as follows:

The Entity shortcut name: TestSandboxBundle:

Configuration format for all (yml, xml, php, or annotation) [annotation]: annotation

Note that the primary key will be added automatically (named id). When it asks do you want to generate an empty repository class say yes.

You can now start using the generated code!