Facades and Factories

My goal with CSVelte is to provide a simple, yet powerful and flexible object-oriented interface for CSV data processing and manipulation. Sometimes though, in order to provide the level of flexibility I desire, simplicity and ease of use suffer. But, being the hard-headed fella that I am, rather than give up any of that power or flexibility, I provide you with facades and factory methods which instead abstract away that flexibility in favor of ease of use.

Note

If you’re wondering why I showed you these last, it’s because I wanted you to learn how to instantiate readers and writers manually before resorting to factory/facade methods exclusively. Using these methods eliminates the possibility for you to use a custom IO\Stream object, effectively eliminating a huge chunk of functionality just to save a few keystrokes. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with shortcuts, just don’t overdo it.

Factory methods

CSVelte provides, via the CSVelte class, several methods for quickly and easily generating common objects. Let’s take a look at them.

static reader($uri[, $flavor = null])
Parameters:
  • $uri (string) – A fully-qualified stream URI or the path to a local file.
  • $flavor (array|Flavor) – An explicit flavor object or an array of flavor attributes to pass to the reader.
Returns:

Reader object for specified stream URI or file
Throws:

Exception\IOException

Reader factory method. Provides a shortcut for creating a Reader object.

<?php
foreach (CSVelte::reader("./data/inventory.csv") as $line_no => $row) {
    do_something_with($row);
}
static writer($uri[, $flavor = null])
Parameters:
  • $uri (string) – A fully-qualified stream URI or the path to a local file.
  • $flavor (array|Flavor) – An explicit flavor object or an array of flavor attributes to pass to the reader.
Returns:

Writer object for specified stream URI or file

Writer factory method. Provides a shortcut for creating a Writer object.

<?php
$data = some_func_that_returns_tabular_data();
CSVelte::writer("./data/reports.csv", [
    'delimiter' => "\t",
    'lineTerminator' => "\n"
])->writeRows($data);

Facade methods

The CSVelte class also provides the following facade methods [1].

static export($uri[, $data[, $flavor = null]])
Parameters:
  • $uri (string) – A fully-qualified stream URI or the path to a local file.
  • $data (mixed) – Anything that can be passed to Writer::writeRows()
  • $flavor (array|Flavor) – An explicit flavor object or an array of flavor attributes to pass to the reader.
Returns:

The number of rows written to the output stream.

Writer facade method. Provides a shortcut for exporting tabular data to a stream or local file.

<?php
$data = some_func_that_returns_tabular_data();
CSVelte::export("./data/reports.csv", $data, [
    'delimiter' => "\t",
    'lineTerminator' => "\n"
]);

Hint

Although there isn’t currently a CSVelte::import() method (to produce a two-dimensional array from a CSV dataset), you may combine the CSVelte::reader() and CSVelte::toArray() methods to approximate this functionality.

CSVelte::reader("./data/products.csv")->toArray();

Tip

It’s a trade-off, like almost any design decision in programming. And it’s one you’ll have to make when you go to write your own code using CSVelte. The question you need to ask yourself is, “Do I need power and flexibility, or do I just need to get shit done?”

Footnotes

[1]A facade, in programming, is the abstraction of a complex and/or verbose interface into a more concise, simpler one. See “facade design pattern”.