CakePHP 5: Geospatial Behavior for Tables

CakePHP 5.1.0 introduced limited support for geospatial types.

The geometry, point, linestring, and polygon types are also known as the “geospatial types”. CakePHP offers limited support for geospatial columns. Currently they can be defined in migrations, read in schema reflection, and have values set as text.

Because internally all of the above are typemapped to \Cake\Database\Type\StringType, CakePHP:

• reads them as string, resulting in binary gibberish;
• writes them as literal string ('POINT(0 0)'), resulting in database errors ("SQLSTATE[22003]: Numeric value out of range: 1416 Cannot get geometry object from data you send to the GEOMETRY field").

This plugin offers a quick Behavior you can attach to your tables having geospatial columns. In the spirit of convention over configuration, these geospatial columns will be detected automatically, so you don't have to explicitly configure anything. It will then become much simpler and faster to read from, and write to them.

Note: right now this plugin supports the POINT type only.

Setting up

Install:

composer require bakeoff/geospatial

In your Table classes:

$this->addBehavior('Bakeoff/Geospatial.Geospatial');

Reading POINT

Get your entities as usual. The geospatial columns will be parsed.

$entity = $myTable->get(123);
debug($entity->position);

[
    'order' => (int) 1,
    'type' => (int) 1,
    'x' => (float) 12.34,
    'y' => (float) 56.78,
]

Writing POINT

$data = $this->getRequest()->getData();
// Provide the POINT information as array with two elements
$data['position'] = array($position_x, $position_y);
$entity = $myTable->patchEntity($entity, $data);
$result = $myTable->save($entity);