Working with the Annotation Manager
Note
Some programmers learn best by seeing a practical example - if you belong to those who learn best by seeing things applied, you should start by taking a look at the :doc:`demo script <DemoScript>`, which provides a minimal, yet practical, real-world example of applying and consuming source code annotations.
The annotation framework lives in the mindplay\annotations namespace, and the library
of :doc:`standard annotations <AnnotationLibrary>` lives in the mindplay\annotations\standard namespace.
The heart of the annotation framework is the AnnotationManager class, which provides the following functionality:
- Inspecting (and filtering) annotations
- Annotation registry and name-resolution
- Caching annotations in the local filesystem (underneath the hood)
Behind the scenes, the AnnotationManager relies on the AnnotationParser to perform the parsing and compilation
of annotations into cacheable scripts.
For convenience, a static (singleton) wrapper-class for the annotation manager is also available. This class is named Annotations - we will use it in the following examples.
Loading and Importing
Going into details about autoloading and importing the annotation classes is beyond the scope of this article.
I will assume you are familiar with these language features, and in the following examples, it is implied that the static wrapper-class has been imported, e.g.:
use mindplay\annotations\Annotations;
Configuring the Annotation Manager
For convenience, the static Annotations class provides a public $config array - the keys in this array are
applied the singleton AnnotationManager instance on first use, for example:
Annotations::$config = array(
'cachePath' => sys_get_temp_dir()
);
In this example, when the AnnotationManager is initialized, the public $cachePath property is set to point
to the local temp-dir on your system.
Other configurable properties include:
| Property | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
$fileMode |
int | … |
$autoload |
bool | … |
$cachePath |
string | … |
$cacheSeed |
string | … |
$suffix |
string | … |
$namespace |
string | … |
$registry |
array | … |
The Annotation Registry
...
Inspecting Annotations
...
Annotation Name Resolution
...
Filtering Annotations
...