ORM Designer and Doctrine ORM
Visualize your Doctrine schema
Keep your text editor for code editing, you don't need to use it for database modeling anymore. With ORM Designer you don't only get an ERD editor but a full featured Doctrine ORM manager. You model and develop all at once. ORM Designer is ready for Doctrine ORM and lets you work with all the core features (behaviors, many to many relations, vendor options etc.). Using ORM Designer means you work faster and with no typos or wrong relations.
Be more effective
When we were working on ORM Designer we asked ourselves what are our everydays tasks and we did our best to make these tasks easy and fast. We are proud of the searching and model navigation features. We hope you will enjoy "Summary window" which provides full text search through columns, tables, relations or indexes. Or a fully searchable "Project tree" which is another helpful visualization of your Doctrine project.
ERD and ORM modeling
ORM Designer separates an ERD model design and additional Doctrine ORM properties. We think that application model should start with a database model that is refactored during the life cycle of the application. With ORM Designer you start with tables, relationships, regions and application modules.
Once the database model is ready you start configuring the domain model by adding table/object ORM properties. ORM Designer offers you only the properties allowed for a table/relationship/module depending on the context. There is also a selector/validator if you can select only a column, a table or a certain value type.
Doctrine core behaviors are also supported by ORM Designer. You are able to assing unlimited number of behaviors to any table in the model. Each behavior has a definition of allowed parameters and parameter types. You can also add any custom behavior the the ORM Designer list as described in the article How to configure new ORM properties and data types.
Doctrine easy Import/Export
One of our primary targets was to make starting with ORM Designer as easy as possible. You don't need to model all your existing applications. All you have to do is to select the project directory and ORM Designer will search for schema files. If you have more than one schema file, ORM Designer will keep tables from this file in a separate module/plugin.
Newly imported tables are automaticaly arranged and placed into modules. Modules can be shared between multiple projects with table and relationship arrangement preserved within the module. ORM Designer exports Doctrine definitions back into shema.yml file (or multiple files) in a human readable format.
If you use Symfony framework, you can use a tutorial How to import existing symfony project. If you use Doctrine in some other MVC framework, follow the article How to import any existing project based on Propel or Doctrine ORM.
Many-to-many relationship support
One of the great features of Doctrine ORM is a many-to-many relationship support. As the definition in YAML format is really tricky and you can easily make mistake which is hard to find we have added an extra tool for M:N relationships. Many-to-many relationships wizard will guide you through selecting source and reference tables and will add foreign key columns if needed.
External tools
ORM Designer enables you to set an external tool. Each external tool is defined by its executable-path, arguments and by default path. It is also possible to use pre-defined constants that are evaluated before tool is executed. These constants can be substituted with current project name, project path, ORM or MVC framework.
Download ORM Designer with full Doctrine support
If you are interested in ORM Designer application, here you can download a free 14 days trial version.
Appendix: Supported Doctrine properties and behaviors
Supported Doctrine properties
| Object | Property |
|---|---|
| Module | Name |
| Entity | Name |
| Field | Name, Type, Size, Required, Unique, Primary key, Auto increment, Default value, Enum values |
| Association (1:m ) | Name, Reference columns, Owning alias, Inverse Alias, Association type, Parent required |
| Index | Name, Unique, Indexed columns |
| Many to Many association | M:N Table, Foreign keys used to define many-to-many relation |
Doctrine ORM table/module properties:
- type
- collate
- charset
- inheritance
- keyField
- keyValue
- extends
Supported Doctrine behaviors:
- Versionable
- Timestampable
- Sluggable
- I18n
- NestedSet
- Searchable
- Geographical
- SoftDelete
- EventLoggable
- GoogleI18n
- Sortable
- Blameable
- Taggable
Doctrine is an object relational mapper (ORM) for PHP 5.2.3+ that sits on top of a powerful database abstraction layer (DBAL). One of its key features is the option to write database queries in a proprietary object oriented SQL dialect called Doctrine Query Language (DQL), inspired by Hibernates HQL. This provides developers with a powerful alternative to SQL that maintains flexibility without requiring unnecessary code duplication.
