Add caching to Zend\\Form\\Annotation\\AnnotationBuilder

Question

As I've finally found a binary of memcache for PHP 5.4.4 on Windows, I'm speeding up the application I'm currently developing.

I've succeeded setting memcache as Doctrine ORM Mapping Cache driver, but I need to fix another leakage: Forms built using annotations.

I'm creating forms according to the Annotations section of the docs. Unfortunately, this takes a lot of time, especially when creating multiple forms for a single page.

Is it possible to add caching to this process? I've browsed through the code but it seems like the Zend\Form\Annotation\AnnotationBuilder always creates the form by reflecting the code and parsing the annotations. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You might wanna try something like this:

class ZendFormCachedController extends Zend_Controller_Action
{
    protected $_formId = 'form';

    public function indexAction()
    {
            $frontend = array(
                    'lifetime' => 7200,
                    'automatic_serialization' => true);

            $backend = array('cache_dir' => '/tmp/');
            $cache = Zend_Cache::factory('Core', 'File', $frontend, $backend);

            if ($this->getRequest()->isPost()) {
                    $form = $this->getForm(new Zend_Form);
            } else if (! $form = $cache->load($this->_formId)) {
                    $form = $this->getForm(new Zend_Form);
                    $cache->save($form->__toString(), $this->_formId);
            }

            $this->getHelper('layout')->setLayout('zend-form');
            $this->view->form = $form;
    }

Found here.

Answer 2

Louis's answer didn't work for me so what I did was simply extend AnnotationBuilder's constructor to take a cache object and then modified getFormSpecification to use that cache to cache the result. My function is below..

Very quick work around...sure it could be improved. In my case, I was limited to some old hardware and this took the load time on a page from 10+ seconds to about 1 second

/**
 * Creates and returns a form specification for use with a factory
 *
 * Parses the object provided, and processes annotations for the class and
 * all properties. Information from annotations is then used to create
 * specifications for a form, its elements, and its input filter.
 *
 * MODIFIED: Now uses local cache to store parsed annotations
 *
 * @param  string|object $entity Either an instance or a valid class name for an entity
 * @throws Exception\InvalidArgumentException if $entity is not an object or class name
 * @return ArrayObject
 */
public function getFormSpecification($entity)
{
    if (!is_object($entity)) {
        if ((is_string($entity) && (!class_exists($entity))) // non-existent class
            || (!is_string($entity)) // not an object or string
        ) {
            throw new Exception\InvalidArgumentException(sprintf(
                '%s expects an object or valid class name; received "%s"',
                __METHOD__,
                var_export($entity, 1)
            ));
        }
    }

    $formSpec = NULL;
    if ($this->cache) { 
        //generate cache key from entity name
        $cacheKey =  (is_string($entity) ? $entity : get_class($entity)) . '_form_cache';

        //get the cached form annotations, try cache first
        $formSpec = $this->cache->getItem($cacheKey);
    }
    if (empty($formSpec)) {
        $this->entity      = $entity;
        $annotationManager = $this->getAnnotationManager();
        $formSpec          = new ArrayObject();
        $filterSpec        = new ArrayObject();

        $reflection  = new ClassReflection($entity);
        $annotations = $reflection->getAnnotations($annotationManager);

        if ($annotations instanceof AnnotationCollection) {
            $this->configureForm($annotations, $reflection, $formSpec, $filterSpec);
        }

        foreach ($reflection->getProperties() as $property) {
            $annotations = $property->getAnnotations($annotationManager);

            if ($annotations instanceof AnnotationCollection) {
                $this->configureElement($annotations, $property, $formSpec, $filterSpec);
            }
        }

        if (!isset($formSpec['input_filter'])) {
            $formSpec['input_filter'] = $filterSpec;
        }

        //save annotations to cache
        if ($this->cache) { 
            $this->cache->addItem($cacheKey, $formSpec);
        }
    }

    return $formSpec;
}