Working With Existing Databases

The following topics are targeted for developers who already have a working database solution in place, but would like to use Propel to work with the data. For this case, Propel provides a number of command-line utilities helping with migrations of data and data structures.

Working with Database Structures

Propel uses an abstract XML schema file to represent databases (the schema). Propel builds the SQL specific to a database based on this schema. Propel also provides a way to reverse-engineer the generic schema file based on database metadata.

Creating an XML Schema from a DB Structure

To generate a schema file, create a new directory for your project & specify the connection information in your configuration file for that project. For example, to create a new project, legacyapp, follow these steps:

1. If your database has some third party application tables, you can add them to the exclude_tables configuration node.

2. Go to the legacyapp project directory anywhere on your filesystem:

   bash $ cd legacyapp

3. Run the reverse task to generate the schema.xml specifying your database credentials:

   bash $ propel reverse "mysql:host=localhost;dbname=db;user=root;password=pwd"

   The given string is a DSN which will be passed to a PDO object. See the Configuration reference for further information.

4. Pay attention to any errors/warnings issued during the task execution and then examine the generated schema.xml file to make any corrections needed.

5. You’re done! Now you have a schema.xml file in the legacyapp/ project directory. You can now run the default Propel build to generate all the classes.

The generated schema.xml file should be used as a guide, not a final answer. There are some datatypes that Propel may not be familiar with; also some datatypes are simply not supported by Propel (e.g. arrays in PostgreSQL). Unfamiliar datatypes will be reported as warnings and substituted with a default VARCHAR datatype.

TipThe reverse engineering classes may not be able to provide the same level of detail for all databases. In particular, metadata information for SQLite is often very basic since SQLite is a typeless database.

Migrating Structure to a New RDBMS

Because Propel has both the ability to create XML schema files based on existing database structures and to create RDBMS-specific DDL SQL from the XML schema file, you can use Propel to convert one database into another.

To do this you would simply:

1. Follow the steps above to create the schema.xml file from existing db.

2. Then you would change the target database type and specify connection URL for new database in the project’s configuration file (for further information, see the configuration documentation)

3. And then run the sql:build task to generate the new DDL:

   bash $ propel sql:build

4. And (optionally) the sql:insert task to create the new database:

   bash $ propel sql:insert