Aliasing

Normally, a property that contains a bean needs to be named after it's type. We have seen this with parent objects; to access the village a building belongs to, you just read the

property. 90% of the time this is exactly what you need. A parent object can be aliased though.

When dealing with people you often have to store persons using a role name. For instance, two people are working on a science project. Both people are in fact 'person' beans. However one of them is a teacher and the other is a student.

RedBeanPHP will store both the student and the teacher as persons because RedBeanPHP simply ignores the property name when saving. RedBeanPHP stores the student and the teacher both as person beans and the project table will get two fields: teacher_id and student_id pointing to the respective person records. However when you retrieve the project from the database, you need to to tell RedBeanPHP that a student or teacher is in fact a person. To do so, you have to use the fetchAs() function:

Aliased Lists (3.3+)

To get a list of all projects associated with a certain person, in the role of a student (aliased as student) use:

Note that some functions do not support aliased properties; most notably R::dependencies() and R::exportAll(). Also, aliased names are cached, a list won't reload if prefixed with an alias() method. In version 3.5+ the list will reload if the alias has changed though.

Aliased lists have been added in version 3.3

Aliasing is the RedBeanPHP way of saying 'one-to-X'.