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ORM and Data Collections
For this purpose, I have created the Interactive Magento Console (IMC), which is
a shell script specially created for this book and inspired by Ruby's own Interactive
Ruby Console (IRB). Follow these steps:
1. The first thing we will need to do is to install the IMC. To do so, download
the source files from https://github.com/amacgregor/mdg_imc and
extract them under your Magento test installation. The IMC is a simple
Magento shell script that will allow us to test our code in real time.
2. Once you extracted the script, log in to the shell of your virtualbox.
3. Next, we will need to navigate to our Magento root folder. If you are using
the default vagrant box, the installation is already provided; the root folder
is located under /srv/www/ce1720/public_html/, and we navigate to it by
running the following command line:
$ cd /srv/www/ce1720/public_html
4. Finally, we can start the IMC by running the following command line:
$ php shell/imc.php
5. If everything is installed successfully, we should see a new line starting with
magento >.
Magento Model Anatomy
As we learned in the previous chapter, Magento Data Models are used to manipulate
and access the data. The model layer is divided into two fundamental types, simple
models and EAV, where:
• Simple Models: These model implementations are simple mappings of one
object to one table, meaning that our object attributes match each field and
our table structure
• Entity Attribute Value Models (EAV): These type of models are used to
describe entities with a dynamic number of attributes
Note that it is important to clarify that not all Magento Models
extend or Mage use the ORM. Observers are a clear example of
simpler Model classes that are not mapped to a specific database
table or entity.
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