README

Small library providing an Iterator that batches requests for additional values. This is useful as a foundation for iterators over data that is in an expensive to access location, such as a database or a web API.

Class overview

Core interface:

• BatchingIterator - iterator that batches requests via a BatchingFetcher
• BatchingFetcher - interface with fetchNext method. You will likely need to create an implementation

Utilities:

• MultipleBatchingFetcher - combines a number of BatchingFetcher instances into one
• InMemoryBatchingFetcher - adapts an array to the BatchingFetcher interface
• IteratorBasedBatchingFetcher - adapts an Iterator to the BatchingFetcher interface

Usage

Create a service that uses an Iterator.

class TweetImporter {

    public function importTweets( Iterator $tweets ) {
        foreach ( $tweets as $tweet ) {
            $this->tweetStore->saveTweet( $tweet );
        }
    }

}

Note how this service only depends on Iterator. It is not aware of how the Iterator provides its results. You thus decoupled the service from who retrieves the results, and from when this happens. They could be coming from values already in memory, wrapped in an ArrayIterator, or be pulled from a web service as iteration happens. Using an ArrayIterator is very helpful for testing.

Implement the BatchingFetcher interface. If you already have a service to retrieve the data, this can be a simple wrapper.

class BatchingTweetFetcher implements BatchingFetcher {

    public function fetchNext( $maxFetchCount ) {
        // Make a call to some external service to fetch $tweets
        return $tweets;
    }

    public function rewind() {
        // Go back to the first tweet
    }

}

Now you can easily instantiate the service, have the batching optimization, and have all responsibilities nicely decoupled.

class TweetImportCli {

    public function importTweets() {
        $tweetIterator = new BatchingIterator( new BatchingTweetFetcher() );
        $tweetIterator->setMaxBatchSize( 42 );
        
        $this->tweetImporter->importTweets( $tweetIterator );
    }

}

Installation

You can use Composer to download and install this package as well as its dependencies.

To add this package as a local, per-project dependency to your project, simply add a dependency on jeroen/batching-iterator to your project's composer.json file. Here is a minimal example of a composer.json file that just defines a dependency on BatchingIterator 3.x:

{
    "require": {
        "jeroen/batching-iterator": "~3.0"
    }
}

Release notes

Version 3.0.0 (2017-05-16)

• Dropped support for PHP 5.x
• Added scalar and return type hints

Version 2.1.2 (2014-11-02)

• The max batch size in BatchingIterator now defaults to 10, avoiding usage of the iterator without this value being set.

Version 2.1.1 (2014-08-19)

• Release with package name jeroen/batching-iterator instead of jeroen-de-dauw/batching-iterator.

Version 2.1 (2014-07-19)

• MultipleBatchingFetcher now accepts an array of BatchingFetcher in its constructor

Version 2.0 (2014-07-19)

Breaking changes:

• Added rewind method to the BatchingFetcher interface
• Renamed BatchingIterator\InMemoryBatchingFetcher to BatchingIterator\Fetchers\InMemoryBatchingFetcher

New features and enhancements:

• BatchingIterator can now be iterated over multiple times
• Added MultipleBatchingFetcher
• Added IteratorBasedBatchingFetcher

Version 1.0 (2014-07-03)

Initial release with

• BatchingIterator class
• BatchingFetcher interface
• InMemoryBatchingFetcher trivial implementation of BatchingFetcher