Magento 2: Replacements for getModel and getSingleton

Recent builds of Magento 2 have done away with the global Mage class. There are pros and cons to this, and I feel a more in depth blog post stirring in my gut, but that will need to wait for another time.

Of more immediate concern: without a Mage class, how does a developer instantiate model or magento-singleton object? The Mage::getModel and Mage::getSingleton methods have been retired, and in their place Magento has a new “Object Manager” object.

Right now this object manager is a PHP singleton, which you can grab with the following call.

$object_manager = MagentoCoreModelObjectManager::getInstance();

I say “right now” because from the looks of things, Magento is moving towards an architecture where this object will be automatically available in appropriate places as the _objectManager property.

$this->_objectManager

Regardless of how you grab an instance of the object manager, the two methods you’re interested in are get and create. The get method replaces getSingleton

$logger = $object_manager->get('MagentoCoreModelLogger');

If you take a look at the object manager source

#File: lib/Magento/ObjectManager/ObjectManager.php
/**
 * Retrieve cached object instance
 *
 * @param string $type
 * @return mixed
 */
public function get($type)
{
    $type = $this->_config->getPreference($type);
    if (!isset($this->_sharedInstances[$type])) {
        $this->_sharedInstances[$type] = $this->_factory->create($type);
    }
    return $this->_sharedInstances[$type];
}

You’ll see this implements a pattern very similar to the old Magento 1 getSingleton method, but that the doc block simply refers to this as a “cached object instance”.

As for the Mage::getModel method, this has been replaced by the object manager’s create method.

$url = $object_manager->create('MagentoCoreModelUrl');

Again, if you take a look at the source code

/**
 * Create new object instance
 *
 * @param string $type
 * @param array $arguments
 * @return mixed
 */
public function create($type, array $arguments = array())
{
    return $this->_factory->create($this->_config->getPreference($type), $arguments);
}

You’ll see in the doc block that this creates a new instance. You’ll also notice both get and create use the same PHP code to actually do their instantiating.

$this->_factory->create($type);

You’ll also notice the class alias strings are No_Longer_Underscore_Separated and instead they’re NamespaceSeparated

$logger = $object_manager->get('MagentoCoreModelLogger');
$url    = $object_manager->create('MagentoCoreModelUrl');

Lots to think about here.