Core concepts

Introduction

Claroline is built on top of the Symfony framework (version 4.x). It also relies on libraries and frameworks commonly associated with Symfony, such as Doctrine and Twig. This documentation doesn’t cover the usage of those dependencies. If you have any trouble with them, please refer to their official documentation :

• Symfony
• Doctrine
• Twig

Sections below, and more generally this documentation, are intended to highlight differences between Claroline and the standard Symfony distribution, as well as the particular technical choices that have been made so far.

Bundles

The bundles are structured in the same way than any Symfony bundle. You will find in most of the bundles the usual Controller, Entity, Resources, etc. directories.

Database

Claroline use the Doctrine ORM for database interactions. It allows both a simpler development process and a portability across the major RDBMS (see the DBAL documentation for a list of supported drivers).

Data fixtures

A useful feature is the ability to load automatically some data sets in the database, whether to provide some demo samples with a bundle or to have data to work with in an automatic test. In Claroline, this result is achieved using the Doctrine Data Fixtures library. A fixture is simply a class implementing a load method, to which an instance of the entity manager is passed by Doctrine when the fixture is executed. In that method, you can therefore use the manager to persist any needed data. Example :

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namespace Foo\BarBundle\DataFixtures;

use Doctrine\Common\DataFixtures\AbstractFixture;
use Doctrine\Persistence\ObjectManager;
use Foo\BarBundle\Entity\FooEntity;

class FooFixture extends AbstractFixture
{
    public function load(ObjectManager $manager)
    {
        $foo = new FooEntity();
        $foo->setName('bar');
        $manager->persist($foo);
        $manager->flush();
    }
}

The data fixtures loading is also part of the installation of every bundle in Claroline. To benefit from this feature, simply put your fixture classes in a Installation\DataFixtures directory :

bundle
+-- Installation
    +-- DataFixtures
        +-- FooFixture.php

Using those fixtures in a test requires to instantiate the fixture class and provide its dependencies manually. This will be covered later in this documentation.