FLOW3 packages may provide any amount of static resources. They might be images, stylesheets, javascripts, templates or any other file which is used within the application or published to the web. Static resources may either be public or private:

Whether a static package resource is public or private is determined by its parent directory. For a package Foo the public resources reside in a folder called Foo/Resources/Public/ while the private resources are stored in Foo/Resources/Private/. The directory structure below Public and Private is up to you and will be cloned to the web resources folder.

Data which was uploaded by a user or generated by your application is called a persistent resource. Although these resources are usually stored as files, they are never referred to by their path and filename directly but are represented by Resource objects.

New persistent resources can be created by either importing or uploading a file. In either case the result is a new Resource object which can be attached to any other object. A resource exists as long as the Resource object is connected to another entity or value object which is persisted. If a resource is not attached to any other persisted object, it will be cleaned up at the end of the script run.

Importing resources is one way to create a new resource object. The ResourceManager provides a simple API method for this purpose:

class ImageController {

   /**
    * @inject
    * @var \F3\FLOW3\Resource\ResourceManager
    */
   protected $resourceManager;

   // ... more code here ...

   /**
    * Imports an image
    * 
    * @param string $imagePathAndFilename
    * @return void
    */
   public function importImageAction($imagePathAndFilename) {
      $newResource = $this->resourceManager->importResource($imagePathAndFilename);
      
      $newImage = $this->objectFactory->create('F3\MyPackage\Domain\Model\Image');
      $newImage->setOriginalResource($newResource);

      $this->imageRepository->add($newImage);
   }
}

The ImageController in our example provides a method to import a new image. Because an image consists of more than just the image file (we need a title, caption, generate a thumbnail, ...) we created a whole new model representing an image. The imported resource is considered as the "original resource" of the image and the Image model could easily provide a "thumbnail resource" for a smaller version of the original.

This is what happens in detail while executing the importImageAction method:

In order to delete a resource just disconnect the resource object from the persisted object, for example by unsetting originalResource in the Image object.

The second way to create new resources is uploading them via a POST request. FLOW3's MVC framework detects incoming file uploads and automatically converts them into Resource objects. In order to persist an uploaded resource you only need to persist the resulting object.

Consider the following Fluid template:

<f:form method="post" action="create" object="{newImage}" name="newImage" enctype="multipart/form-data">
   <f:form.textbox property="image.title" value="My image title" />
   <f:form.upload property="image.originalResource" />
   <f:form.submit value="Submit new image"/>
</f:form>

This form allows for submitting a new image which consists of an image title and the image resource (e.g. a JPEG file). The following controller can handle the submission of the above form:

class ImageController {

   /**
    * @inject
    * @var \F3\FLOW3\Resource\ResourceManager
    */
   protected $resourceManager;

   // ... more code here ...

   /**
    * Creates a new image
    * 
    * @param \F3\MyPacakge\Domain\Model\Image $newImage The new image
    * @return void
    */
   public function createAction(\F3\MyPacakge\Domain\Model\Image $newImage) {
      $this->imageRepository->add($newImage);
      $this->forward('index');
   }
}

Provided that the Image class has a title and a originalResource property and that they are accessible through setTitle and setOriginalResource respectively the above code will work just as expected.

Static resources are often used by packages internally. Typical use cases are templates, XML, YAML or other data files and images for further processing. You might be tempted to refer to these files by using one of the FLOW3_PATH_* constants or by creating a path relative to your package. A much better and more convenient way is using FLOW3's built-in stream package resources wrapper.

The following example reads the content of the file MyPackage/Resources/Private/Templates/SomeTemplate.html into a variable:

$template = file_get_contents('package://MyPackage/Private/Templates/SomeTemplate.html');

You are encouraged to use this stream wrapper wherever you need to access a static package resource in your PHP code.