Writers

Use writers to write the result of the workflow. The target doesn't necessarily have to write to a persistent storage, you can also write, for example, into arrays or objects. Writers must implement the WriterInterface that provides three methods: writeItem(), prepare() and finish(). The workflow calls prepare() before it reads the first item and finish() after it read the last item.

Multiple writers can be added to a workflow in any ordering. Therefore it is possible to filter the read items, write them somewhere, further filter them and then write them elsewhere.

Table of Contents

• ArrayWriter
• ConsoleProgressWriter
• CsvWriter
• JsonWriter
• Conditional Writers

ArrayWriter

The ArrayWriter writes the data into an array that can be retrieved using the getData() method.

use Cocur\Plum\Writer\ArrayWriter;

$writer = new ArrayWriter();
// Workflow processing
$writer->getData() // -> [...]

ConsoleProgressWriter

In a console application that uses Symfony's Console component you can use ConsoleProgressWriter to give the user feedback on the progress of the workflow.

use Cocur\Plum\Writer\ConsoleProgressWriter;

$worklow->addWriter(new ConsoleProgressWriter($progressBar));
$worklow->addWriter($otherWriter);

CsvWriter

The CsvWriter allows you to write the data into a .csv file.

use Cocur\Plum\Writer\CsvWriter;

$writer = new CsvWriter('foobar.csv', ',', '"');
$writer->prepare();
$writer->writeItem(['value 1', 'value 2', 'value 3');
$writer->finish();

The second and third argument of __construct() are optional and by default , and " respectively. In addition the setHeader() method can be used to define the names of the columns. It has to be called before the prepare().

$writer = new CsvWriter('foobar.csv');
$writer->setHeader(['column 1', 'column 2', 'column 3']);
$writer->prepare();

JsonWriter

JsonWriter writes the items as JSON into a file. It uses Braincrafted\Json to encode the items.

use Cocur\Plum\Writer\JsonWriter;

$writer = new JsonWriter('foobar.json');
$writer->writeItem(['key1' => 'value1', 'key2' => 'value2'));
$writer->finish();

It is essential that finish() is called, because there happens the actual writing. The prepare() method does nothing.

Conditional Writers

Writers can be conditional if a filter is passed to the addWriter() method.

$workflow->addWriter($writer, $filter);

An item is only written to a conditional writer, if the filter returns true for the item.