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Create a Bean

Using RedBeanPHP is easy. First create a bean. A bean is just a plain old object with public properties. Every bean has an id and a type.


    $book = R::dispense('book');

Now we have an empty bean of type book with id 0. Let's add some properties:


    $book->title = 'Gifted Programmers';
    $book->author = 'Charles Xavier';

Or… if you're in the mood for chaining you can use:
$book->setAttr('title','Gifted Programmers')->setAttr(..) etc…
(requires version 3.3+)

Let's store this bean in the database:


    $id = R::store($book);

That's all? Yes. Everything has been written to the database! RedBeanPHP automatically creates the table and the columns.

Note that the store() function returns the ID of the record. Also, there is storeAll($beans) in RedBeanPHP 3.1

How does it work?

RedBean dynamically adds columns if you add new properties:


    $book->price = 100;

RedBeanPHP also updates the column type to support a different type of value. For instance, this will cause the column to change from TINYINT to DOUBLE:


    $book->price = 99.99;

More data types

You can store other data types as well:


    $meeting->when = '19:00:00'; //Time
    $meeting->when = '1995-12-05'; //Date
    $photo->created = '1995-12-05 19:00:00'; //Date time
    $meeting->place = '(1,2)'; //only works in postgres

You can use R::isoDate() and R::isoDateTime() to generate the current date(time) if you like.

Dispense multiple beans

To dispense multiple beans at once:


    $twoBooks = R::dispense('book',2);

RedBeanPHP 3.5 offers even more comfort for lazy developers:


    //Dispense a book and page in one call:
    list($book, $page)  = R::dispenseAll( 'book,page' );

    //Dispense a book and 10 pages:
    list($book, $pages) = R::dispenseAll( 'book,page*10' );

Start your code with: R::useWriterCache(true); to make use of query caching. This will prevent RedBeanPHP from performing unnecessary queries. This feature is available since RedBeanPHP 3.4. While RedBeanPHP offers other caching mechanisms as well this is the easiest to use and it's completely transparent!

Bean types may only consist of lowercase alphanumeric symbols a-z and 0-9 (no underscores). A property name has to begin with a letter and may consists of letters and numbers. Underscores in property names are allowed but I recommend to come up with better nouns instead.

Underscores in Bean types are not allowed because RedBeanPHP uses these to identify relations. Underscores are used to denote a relation between two beans, therefore you should not dispense such beans yourself.

The RedBeanPHP naming restrictions allow RedBeanPHP to figure out relationships among tables and beans without configuration; however these rules also help you to maintain a clean and consistent database schema. Moreover, developers often make up terrible names for tables (i.e. 'tbl_userrights', 'person_Project' etc…). I try to encourage people to take some time to find the correct 'name' (often a simple noun) for their beans (i.e. 'privilege','participant'). This also improves the readability (and maintainability) of your database. Just take some time to find the noun that describes the entity you're modelling best.

If, for some reason you really need to break these rules use: Use R::setStrictTyping(false); This may cause some side effects with dup() and export() though.

As of RedBeanPHP 3.4, a property name like 'singleMalt' will be automatically converted to 'single_malt'. If you don't like that, use: RedBean_OODBBean::setFlagBeautifulColumnNames(false);


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