Cooker

The cooker is a tool to turn arrays (forms, XML, JSON) into beans. An array has to contain a key named 'type' containing the type of bean it represents. Further more an array can contain own-lists and shared-lists as nested arrays.

    $bandMemberArr = array(
        'type' => 'bandmember',
        'name' => 'Duke',
        'ownInstrument' => array(
            'type'=>'instrument',
            'name'=>'kazoo'    
        )
    );
    
    $bandMemberBean = R::graph($bandMemberArr);

In this example we convert the array 'bandMemberArr' to a bean of type 'bandmember'. The bean can now be stored in the database.



    R::store($bandMemberBean);

If an array has a field with key 'id', the Cooker will try to load the bean instead of dispensing a fresh bean. This means you can also update parts of beans.

The fact that the Cooker also automatically loads beans can become a security issue if you don't verify ID integrity. From RedBeanPHP 3.4 on the Cooker will have an extra safety setting; if you want to enable bean loading you need to invoke:
RedBean_Plugin_Cooker::enableBeanLoading(true);
first. Otherwise the Cooker will not load and/or update existing beans.

R::graph($array,TRUE) will ignore all beans that appear to be empty (You can use this if you build forms; it makes it possible to add an empty form entry to add a new entity of something).