Attention

This manual is no longer being maintained for TYPO3 versions 11.5 and above. The majority of the content has been migrated to the Extbase or Fluid sections in "TYPO3 Explained".

An excursion to the database

During our trip to the database bear in mind that we are in the brush of the Extbase Framework - an area you wouldn't enter without travelling experience or a travel guide. Later you will use the Query Object to create your own requests. If you are not interested in the background of the data storage, but trust that extbase will take care about this, you can skip this chapter.

The BlogRepository creates a Query object with the class \TYPO3\CMS\Extbase\Persistence\Generic\Query, which is specialised for Blog objects, and executes the query ($query->execute()). The Query object is mostly abstracted from the physical storage - normally a relational database. It does not contain any information on how something is searched for. It only contains a specification of what is searched for. The Query object still allows any kind of storage method like a web service, or storage in a text file.

The Query object is handed over to the storage backend. The storage backend translates the request into a form that the given storage method can use directly. In our case this is an SQL-Statement. The call $query->execute() will finally be translated to SELECT * FROM tx_blogexample_domain_model_blog.

The storage backend returns the "raw" results as a collection (array) of database tuples. Every database tuple corresponds to a table row and is in itself an associative array with the field names as keys and the field contents as value. It does not contain any objects yet and it also does not contain any data on posts, comments or tags which belong to the database record. The task to build a complete object tree starting from the Blog object down to the last tag of a post will be handed over to another object - the DataMapper.