Core Concepts

Velo is built around the concept of dynamic EAV (Entity-Attribute-Values). Unlike a traditional Laravel application where you define schema using Migrations and Eloquent Models for each entity, Velo allows you to define your schema at runtime.

Databases

Right now Velo supports only MySQL database since its the most popular database and the one that you can host for cheap. But rest assured, Velo will have a support for PostgreSQL in the future.

Collections

A Collection is like a table in a standard database. It defines the structure and behavior of the data interaction.

There are different types of collections that you can use :

• Base: Standard collections for storing data (e.g., posts, products).
• Auth: Special collections that act as user providers (e.g., users). They come with built-in authentication capabilities.
• View: (Coming Soon) Read-only collections based on SQL queries.

Schema Definition

Each collection has many fields that are defined as a relationship. To get a collection’s fields you can get it through $collection->fields().

Field Types

Velo supports various field types that you can use in your application:

• Text: Simple string values.
• RichText: Rich text content. Same as Text but served with rich text editor on the admin panel.
• Bool: Boolean toggles.
• Number: Integers or floats.
• Email: Email addresses.
• Url: URLs. (Coming soon)
• Select: Single choice from predefined options. (Coming soon)
• Datetime: Date and time values.
• File: File uploads (see File Handling).
• Relation: References to records in other collections.
• Json: Store arbitrary JSON data. (Coming soon)

See more at Enums/FieldType.php.

Records

A Record is an instance of data within a Collection. Internally, Velo uses a records table with a JSON data column to store these dynamic attributes. You can create index on a field to match the performance of a standard SQL schema.

// Accessing record data
$title = $record->data->get('title');
$record->data->put('status', 'active');
$record->save();

API Rules

Collections use API Rules to control access. These are expression strings that evaluate to true or false. Rule expressions are similar to other BaaS rule expressions, but internally they’re just parsed to PHP scripts using Symfony ExpressionLanguage. For convenience, Velo will parse a single = as ==.

• List: Who can list/search records.
• View: Who can view a specific record.
• Create: Who can create new records.
• Update: Who can edit existing records.
• Delete: Who can delete records.

Rules can reference the current user (@request.auth.id) and the record being accessed (id, created, name).

Example:

// Only the creator can access the record
@request.auth.id = user

Next up: Api Reference