COMAND Collections

COMAND Collections are similar to arrays with some additional features.

Array Support

COMAND Collections are like arrays and can be accessed and modified exactly like arrays in PHP code. This includes:

access by index
check with isset
remove with unset
append with []
access number of items with count()
iterate with foreach

For more information, see Collection in the Developer Reference.

Query Support

COMAND Collections can be queried with cPath and cQL to filter the collection by certain criteria.

For more information, see Get Methods in the API Queries Tutorial.

Authorization Support

A number of methods are available to check if a user is authorized to access the objects and object fields in a collection.

Metadata

Additional information about the objects in a collection are also available.

Distinct content types of all objects in the collection.
Number of objects of each content type.

Convenience Methods

Additional methods are available to perform common tasks on collections.

in_collection - check if an object is in a collection
get_repository - get the repository that contains the collection and objects in the collection
get_parent_object - get the object that contains this collection, when applicable
get_parent_field - get the field of the parent object that contains this collection, when applicable
load_object_fields - batch load one or more fields of objects in the collection
get_common_content_type - find the closest inherited content type inherited by all objects in the collection (worst-case is Object)
get_common_display_fields - find fields marked to display in summaries that are common to all objects in a collection
unique - remove duplicate objects from the collection, leaving a collection of all unique objects
get_unique_collection - same as unique, but returns the unique collection, leaving the original collection as-is.
copy - copy a collection to another collection
merge - merge two collections into a single collection, potentially allowing or filtering duplicates
crop - remove objects from a collection outside of a specific index range
as_array - convert the COMAND Collection to a standard PHP array of objects
as_associative_array - convert the COMAND Collection to a standard PHP associative array of objects where the key is the value of a specific field
field_values - convert to a standard PHP array with the value of a specific field from each object, with recursive hierarchy support
reorder_object - change the position of an object from one index to another