This is part 1 (of 4) of an introduction to the use of ArangoDB together with Symfony 2. You’ll find the links to the other parts of this tutorial at the end of this text.

In this tutorial we will implement a very simple movie database as an example of how to use ArangoDB together with Symfony 2. We assume for the tutorial that you know the basic concepts of Symfony2. No prior ArangoDB knowledge is required.

The demo shows how to create, edit, update and delete movies, how to select a list of movies from the database in two different ways. We’ll use the simple query API for most examples. The..

The data structure

Our app deals with movies: each movie has a title, a year of release and it is assigned to a genre. Each movie deals with none, one or many topics.

In a relational database we would probably create a table movie and another table topic and join them with a shared movie id.

ArangoDB follows like other document stores the “aggregate model” approach: In short..

Working with forms

The next example shows the use of ArangoDB with Symfony’s form component.

This is how our form will look like. The topics are represented as a text field and the user is required to separate them by commas. This delivers questionable user experience, but leads to an interesting question: how can we transform our topics array from our movie document to a..

Extending Arangodb\Document

The next thing we want to improve are all those noisy set calls in the controller:

// src/Triagens/ArangodbBundle/Controller/DefaultController.php if ($form->isValid()) { $movie = new ArangoDocument(); $movie->set("title",$form->get("title")->getData()); $movie->set("released",$form->get("released")->getData());..