Models & Lifecycle

Rubik Models are the heart of your application. They handle data transport, persistence, and business logic events.

Dirty State Tracking

Rubik employs an intelligent "Dirty Checking" mechanism.

When a model is fetched (find, all), it is considered "clean".
When you modify a property ($user->name = 'New'), the model marks that specific field as dirty in $_dirty.
When save() or update() is called, only the dirty fields are included in the UPDATE SQL statement.

Benefit: This prevents overwriting data changed by other processes and reduces query size.

The `save()` Method

The save() method is smart. It determines whether to INSERT or UPDATE based on the internal $exists boolean property.

$user = new User();
$user->save(); // Performs INSERT, sets $exists = true

$user->name = "Changed";
$user->save(); // Performs UPDATE on ID

Ignore Mode

You can pass true to save() to perform an "Insert Ignore".

MySQL: INSERT IGNORE INTO...
SQLite: INSERT OR IGNORE INTO...

$user->save(ignore: true); // Skips error if Duplicate Key occurs

Batch Operations

`insertMany`

Inserts multiple arrays of raw data. This bypasses Model events and setters for performance.

User::insertMany([
    ['name' => 'A', 'email' => 'a@a.com'],
    ['name' => 'B', 'email' => 'b@b.com'],
]);

ID Retrieval

insertMany attempts to return the inserted IDs. However, due to limitations in SQLite and MySQL < 8.0.22, batch inserts do not reliably return all generated Auto-Increment IDs.

Lifecycle Hooks

Rubik fires protected methods during the model's lifecycle. Override these in your model to add logic (e.g., Hashing passwords, UUID generation).

Hook	Trigger Point
`beforeCreate`	Before an INSERT query.
`afterCreate`	After a successful INSERT.
`beforeUpdate`	Before an UPDATE query.
`afterUpdate`	After a successful UPDATE.
`beforeSave`	Runs before both Create and Update.
`afterSave`	Runs after both Create and Update.
`beforeDelete`	Before DELETE query.
`afterDelete`	After a successful DELETE.

Example: Auto-hashing Password

class User extends Model {
    protected function beforeSave(): void {
        if (isset($this->_dirty['password'])) {
            $this->password = password_hash($this->password, PASSWORD_BCRYPT);
        }
    }
}

Serialization

Models implement JsonSerializable. When you json_encode($model), it automatically calls toArray(), which returns the internal $_data array.

echo json_encode($user);
// {"id": 1, "name": "John", ...}