Alternative Entity Base Class for CakePHP (PropertyEntity)

This is an alternative base class for your CakePHP entities. The class PropertyEntity extends from Cake's Cake\ORM\Entity class to stay compatible to CakePHP's core logic. This class gives you the ability to initialize/set class properties to your entities. It helps your IDE to get better code completion.

Normal CakePHP Entity

<?php
namespace App\Model\Entity;

use Cake\ORM\Entity;

class User extends Entity
{
    // This does not work (or null etc.)
    protected $username = '123456789';
}

PropertyEntity

<?php
declare(strict_types=1); // recommend

namespace App\Model\Entity;

use PropertyEntity\Model\Entity\PropertyEntity;

class User extends PropertyEntity
{
    /**
     * This value will now be respected.
     * CakePHP's default Entity class ignores this value.
     *
     * @var string|null;
     */
    protected $username = '123456789';
    
    
    /**
     * @param string $value
     * @return User
     */
    public function setUsername(string $value): User
    {
        $this->set('username', $value);
        return $this;
    }


    /**
     * @return string|null
     */
    public function getUsername(): ?string
    {
        return $this->get('username');
    }
}

Normal CakePHP-Entity in Controller

<?php
namespace App\Controller;

use App\Model\Entity\User;

class TestController extends AppController
{
    public function index()
    {
        $userEnity = new User();
        debug($userEnity);
        die();
    }
}

Output ($this->username is missing)

object(App\Model\Entity\User) {
    '[new]' => true,
    '[accessible]' => [
        '*' => true
    ],
    '[dirty]' => [],
    '[original]' => [],
    '[virtual]' => [],
    '[hasErrors]' => false,
    '[errors]' => [],
    '[invalid]' => [],
    '[repository]' => null
}

With PropertyEntity in Controller

object(App\Model\Entity\User) {
	'username' => '123456789',
	'[new]' => true,
	'[accessible]' => [
		'*' => true
	],
	'[dirty]' => [],
	'[original]' => [],
	'[virtual]' => [],
	'[hasErrors]' => false,
	'[errors]' => [],
	'[invalid]' => [],
	'[repository]' => null
}