Creating Models¶

A model represents the data which the application will use and takes care of the interaction to that data. In OPNsense most of the relevant data is physically stored in an xml structure (config.xml). The primary goal for OPNsense models is to structure the use of configuration data, by creating a clear abstraction layer.

In this chapter we will explain how models are designed and build.

Designing the model¶

Creating models for OPNsense is divided into two separate blocks:

A php class describing the actions on our data (also acts as a wrapper to our data),
The definition of the data and the rules it should apply to.

Every model’s class should be derived from OPNsense\Base\BaseModel, a very simple model without any (additional) logic is defined with:

<?php
namespace myVendorName\myModule;

use OPNsense\Base\BaseModel;

class myModel extends BaseModel
{
}

This class should be placed inside the model directory of our project, in this case the full path for our class file would be

/usr/local/opnsense/mvc/app/models/myVendorName/myModule/myModel.php

When you design a model, the next thing to do is to figure out what data is relevant for your application or module and think of the rules it should comply to (for example, if you need an email address you might want to validate the input). Designing the actual model is as simple as creating an xml file and putting in your structure, the name of our xml file should be the same as the base name of our model suffixed by .xml.

Using the same model, we would create the following file:

/usr/local/opnsense/mvc/app/models/myVendorName/myModule/myModel.xml

And start describing our (information) model, like this:

<model>
    <mount>//myManufacturer/myModule</mount>
    <description>A description of this model (metadata)</description>
    <items>
        <exampleNumber type="TextField">
            <Mask>/^([0-9]){0,1}$/</Mask>
            <Default>5</Default>
            <ValidationMessage>you should input a number from 0 to 9</ValidationMessage>
        </exampleNumber>
        <contacts>
            <entity type="ArrayField">
                <email type="EmailField">
                    <ValidationMessage>you should input a valid email address!</ValidationMessage>
                </email>
            <name type="TextField"/>
            </entity>
            <someText type="TextField"/>
        </contacts>
    </items>
</model>

Now let’s explain what’s happing here one tag at a time.

the <model> tag is used for identification of the file. (this is a model file)
Next in line is the <mount> tag, this tells the system where this information lives in the configuration file, in this case ROOT_tag/myManufacturer/myModule
If desired, there is some space reserved to explain the usage of the model, the <description> tag
Last item on the top of our list is the <items> tag, this is where the magic begins.

The content of a items tag describes the full tree based structure which holds our data, in theory this could be as large as you want it to be, but keep in mind that the content for your model should be logical and understandable. Every node in the tree could have a type, which defines it’s behavior, nodes without a type are just containers.

From top to bottom we find the following nodes in our tree:

exampleNumber, defined as a TextField
- Mask, validation can be performed by a regex expression, this sets the expression
- Default, this field is default filled with a number: 5
- ValidationMessage, when validation fails, this message is returned
contacts, this is a container
entity, is defined as a recurring item, which holds the next items
email, defined as an EmailField
- when validation fails, the ValidationMessage is returned
name, defined as a TextField without any validations
someText, not part of the entity tag and also defined as text without validation

The fieldtypes are easily extendable in the base system and they all live in their own namespace at OPNsense\Base\FieldTypes deriving from BaseField.

Usage example¶

Now let’s test our model using a small php script (in /usr/local/opnsense/mvc/script/ ):

<?php
// initialize phalcon components for our script
require_once("load_phalcon.php");

// include myModel and the shared config component
use myVendorName\myModule\myModel;
use OPNsense\Core\Config;

// create a new model, reading the model definition and the current data from our config.xml
$myMdl = new myModel();
$myMdl->exampleNumber =1;
$myMdl->contacts->someText = "just a test";

// add a new contact node
$node = $myMdl->contacts->entity->add();
$node->email = "[email protected]";
$node->name = "my test user";

// perform validation on the data in our model
$validationMessages = $myMdl->performValidation();
foreach ($validationMessages as  $messsage) {
    echo "validation failure on field ". $messsage->getField()."  returning message : ". $messsage->getMessage()."\n";
}

// if validation succeeded, write data back to config
if ($validationMessages->count() == 0) {
    // serialize our model to the config file (config.xml)
    // (this raises an error on validation failures)
    $myMdl->serializeToConfig();
    $cnf = Config::getInstance();
    $cnf->save();
}

If you fill in an invalid value to one of the validated fields, you can easily try the validation. Try to input the text “X” into the field exampleNumber to try out.

When inspecting our config.xml file, you will notice the following content has been added to the root:

<myManufacturer>
  <myModule>
    <exampleNumber>1</exampleNumber>
    <contacts>
      <entity>
        <email>[email protected]</email>
        <name>my test user</name>
      </entity>
      <someText>just a test</someText>
    </contacts>
  </myModule>
</myManufacturer>

Guidelines¶

Some (simple) guidelines developing models

One model should always be completely responsible for the its mount point, so if there’s a model at mount point /A/B there can’t be a model at /A/B/C
Try to keep models logical and understandable, it’s better to build two models for you application if the content of two parts aren’t related to each other. It’s no issue to create models at deeper levels of the structure.
1. When using more models in a application/module, you might want to consider the following naming convention: /Vendor/Module/Model
Try to avoid more disc i/o actions than necessary, only call save() if you actually want to save content, serializeToConfig just keeps the data in memory.