Dynamically change database connection in cakephp 3

Question

I'm trying to change the database connection used in cakephp 3 on the fly. Every answer to this question that I found refers to cakephp 2 (These three for instance).

This guy found a solution for cakephp 3 having a finite number of databases, and specifically defining which Database would be used by which Table file.

The thing is that I want to create a new database for every new user, and change to his database when he logs in. I can't know in advance all the databases that will exist, to write it in the config/app.php file.

And I can't set the default database in each /src/Model/Table file, because the tables are the same in every database.

Answer 1

Use the ConnectionManager::config() function to create connections on the fly and the ConnnectionManager::alias() method to make all your Table classes use it by default.

There is a very good article describing the process here:

http://mark-story.com/posts/view/using-cakephp-and-a-horizontally-sharded-database

The only difference is that you can create the connection config on the fly instead of declaring the shards manually as it was shown in that article.

Answer 2

Change database connection for one model:

In app.php :

'test' => [
            'className' => 'Cake\Database\Connection',
            'driver' => 'Cake\Database\Driver\Mysql',
            'persistent' => false,
            'host' => MySQL_HOST,
            //'port' => 'nonstandard_port_number',
            'port' => MySQL_PORT,
            'username' => MySQL_USER,
            'password' => MySQL_PASS,
            'database' => 'test',
            'encoding' => 'utf8',
            'timezone' => 'UTC',
            'cacheMetadata' => true,
            'quoteIdentifiers' => false,
            'log' => false,
        //'init' => ['SET GLOBAL innodb_stats_on_metadata = 0'],
        ]

In Controller :

$conn = ConnectionManager::get('test');
 $_model = TableRegistry::get('your_alias', ['table' => 'your_table', 'connection' => $conn]);
 
         

Answer 3

Configuring table connections

 namespace App\Model\Table;

 use Cake\ORM\Table;

 class ArticlesTable extends Table
 {
     public static function defaultConnectionName() {
     return 'replica_db';
     }
 }