Use column comments from database for entity annotation

[dmromanov]

It would be great if Bake was using column comments from a table in a database for annotating an Entities' properties.

[dereuromark]

They would need to be stripped/sanitized to avoid chars accidentally breaking the doc blocks.

[dereuromark]

Is someone interested in making a PR here?

[dmromanov]

I am interested but currently can not give any estimates.

[ravage84]

@dmromanov could you show us an example of how it could look and behave? What is the scope of this feature. How far do you want to go?

[dmromanov]

@ravage84 Sure.

Let's pretend that we have a table called "Users"

CREATE TABLE `users` (
  `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT COMMENT 'ID',
  `username` varchar(50) CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci NOT NULL COMMENT 'User login',
  `password` varchar(500) CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci NOT NULL COMMENT 'Password',
  `created` datetime NOT NULL COMMENT 'Creation date',
  `modified` datetime NOT NULL COMMENT 'Modification date',
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
  UNIQUE KEY `username` (`username`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8mb4 COLLATE=utf8mb4_unicode_ci COMMENT='Users';

When I would run cake bake model I expect Bake to create me model classes, and annotate properties using comments from DB.

<?php
/**
 * Users table
 */
class UserTable extends Table {
…
}

/**
 * User Entity
 * @property int $id ID
 * @property string $login User login
 * @property string $password Password
 * @property DateTime $created Creation date
 * @property DateTime $modified Modification date
 */
class User extends Entity {
…
}

And it would be nice if bake had an option to swich this behavior off when baking models.

[dereuromark]

It should not be too difficult to PR this.
Do you want to try it?

[dmromanov]

This feature is on my list, but I can not give any estimates.

[ravage84]

@dmromanov thank you for your explanation. I stand with my counter-arguments on this feature as mentioned in #465 (comment).

But if we are going to implement this feature into bake directly and not as an extension as mentioned by @dereuromark in #465 (comment), I would prefer this behavior to be optional. For example activatable through a CLI parameter and/or an interactive question.