Custom ORM - Suggestions

Hello,

I switched from Laravel to CodeIgniter, I really like simplicity" and freedom that CI brings.

Since I only miss Eloquent in CodeIgniter I started working on my own. My plan isn't something advanced, I want to have relationships and some methods like isSomething().

How it works:

In models I have methods like all(), find($id)... In those methods are $this->db queries. Also, I have Entities. You can see that I run foreach in all() method and there I create Entity instances.

I really like this because I can have relationships or some methods that I can access everytime without writing new queries. For example, I have method isPublic() that checks if column "access_level" isn't set to "private".

There should be something like BaseEntity class or interface that each Entity will extend/use but this is just a prototype. The one thing that really annoys me is this "require_once" call at the top. Is there a better way to load those classes?

I would like to know what do you think about this and what should be improved


Thanks. I appreciate any suggestions.

(sorry if I posted in a wrong subforum)

Controller:

PHP Code:

<?php
defined('BASEPATH') OR exit('No direct script access allowed');

class Welcome extends CI_Controller {
    public function index()
    {
        $data = ["content"=>"welcome_message","users"=>$this->user_model->all()]; // Users will be array of Entity instances
        

        // Serve different index if an user is logged in //
        if($this->session->user) {
            $this->load->model("link_model");
            
            $data["user"] = $this->user_model->find($this->session->user->id); // Entity instance
            $data["content"]="user/index";

        }
        //
        $this->load->view('templates/layout',$data);
    } 


Model:

PHP Code:

<?php

require_once(APPPATH.'entities\User_entity.php');

class User_model extends CI_Model {

    public function all() {
        $query = $this->db->get("users");
        $results = [];
        foreach($query->result() as $row) {
            $results[] = new User_entity($row);
        }
        return $results;
    }

    public function find($id) {
        $query = $this->db->get_where("users",$id);
        foreach($query->result() as $row) {
            return new User_entity($row);
        }
    } 


Entity:

PHP Code:

<?php 
require_once(APPPATH.'entities\Folder_entity.php');

class User_entity {
    public $id;
    public $user_name;
    public $email;
    private $db;

    public function __construct($row) {
        $this->id = $row->id;
        $this->user_name = $row->user_name;
        $this->email = $row->email;
        $ci = & get_instance();
        $this->db = $ci->db;
    }

    public function folders() {
       $this->db->select('folders.id,folders.title,folders.access_level',FALSE);
       $this->db->from('folders,users',FALSE);
       $this->db->where('folders.user_id','users.id',FALSE);

       $query = $this->db->get();

       $results = [];
       foreach($query->result() as $row) {
            $results[] = new \Folder_entity($row);
       }
       return $results;
    }


}