In the latest tutorial in their "Programming with Yii2" series the TutsPlus.com site shows you how to work with the ActiveRecord functionality included with the framework.

In this Programming With Yii2 series, I'm guiding readers in use of the Yii2 Framework for PHP. In today's tutorial, I'll walk you through using Yii's object-relational mapping, known as ORM, for working with databases. It's called Active Record and is a key aspect of programming database applications efficiently in Yii.

Yii offers different ways to work with your database programmatically, such as direct queries and a query builder, but using Active Record offers a complete set of benefits for object-oriented database programming.

The article goes on from there and defines some of the basics around what Active Record is and how it works. It then starts on the code, showing how to create an ActiveRecord model and execute queries to:

• locate single or multiple records
• build queries
• counting records
• and accessing the records returned

They also talk about mass assignment, saving data via model instances, deleting records and creating relationships between the models.