Magento 2 – Tutorial : adding a new model – Part 1 – creating the DB table

Magento 2 – Tutorial : adding a new model – Part 1 – creating the DB table

Introduction

Here is the first post of a series during which I will got through all the procedure to create a new model in magento 2, with its own grid in the Back Office.

Here are the steps we will have to through :

1. Creating the DB table
2. Creating the API data object
3. Creating the model
4. Creating the resource model
5. Creating the collection resource model
6. Creating the grid

I will cover all these steps in a series of posts.

As a preamble, I have to say that this tutorial series has been developed and tested with Magento version 2.4.2.

For the purpose of the series, we will create a simple model for a "provider" entity with the following columns :

• id : the provider unique identifier
• created_at : the date the provider was created
• updated_at : the date the provider was updated
• name : the provider name
• description : the provider description

We will assume that our code will be held in a module Addeos_ModelTutorial.

Creating the table in DB

Rather than using InstallSchema.php file we can now use XML declarative schema definition for creating new tables, or even updating existing tables. This is available since Magento version 2.3.

We will create a db_schema.xml file.

He is the content of the file:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<schema xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
        xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="urn:magento:framework:Setup/Declaration/Schema/etc/schema.xsd">
    <table name="addeos_provider" resource="default" engine="innodb" comment="Porviders">
        <column xsi:type="int" name="entity_id" padding="10" unsigned="true" nullable="false" identity="true"
                comment="Entity ID"/>
        <column xsi:type="timestamp" name="created_at" on_update="false" nullable="false" default="CURRENT_TIMESTAMP"
                comment="Created At"/>
        <column xsi:type="timestamp" name="updated_at" on_update="false" nullable="false" default="CURRENT_TIMESTAMP"
                comment="Updated At"/>
        <column xsi:type="varchar" name="name" nullable="true" comment="Name" length="50"/>
        <column xsi:type="varchar" name="description" nullable="true" comment="Description" length="50"/>
        <constraint xsi:type="primary" referenceId="PRIMARY">
            <column name="entity_id"/>
        </constraint>
        <index referenceId="ADDEOS_PROVIDER_ENTITY_ID" indexType="btree">
            <column name="entity_id"/>
        </index>
    </table>
</schema>

More information on declarative schema can be found here.

Once this file is in place, you will simply need to run a setup upgrade command from your magento installation root directory :

bin/magento setup:upgrade --keep-generated

Once this is done, your new table will be present in DB.

And this is all for that first step.

In the next post I explain the different PHP classes we need to create.