Doctrine Watcher Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Audit Logging & Compliance: Enables automatic tracking of sensitive property changes (e.g., user roles, financial data) without manual intervention, reducing compliance risks and audit effort.
• Event-Driven Architecture: Facilitates decoupled, reactive systems by triggering custom logic (e.g., notifications, syncs, or workflows) in response to entity changes, improving modularity and maintainability.
• Custom Business Rules: Allows embedding domain-specific logic (e.g., "revoke access if status changes to inactive") directly into entity operations without polluting business logic with technical concerns.
• Build vs. Buy: Justifies adopting this lightweight package over building custom event listeners or integrating heavier frameworks (e.g., Symfony’s full event system) for property-level change detection.
• Roadmap Validation: Demonstrates demand for fine-grained entity change monitoring, potentially prioritizing future investments in a more robust event system or audit infrastructure.

When to Consider This Package

• Use This When:

  • You need property-specific change detection (e.g., "alert when User::email updates") rather than entity-wide hooks.
  • Your stack uses Doctrine ORM and PHP 7.1+, with no plans to migrate away.
  • You require post-operation triggers (e.g., after save()) for side effects like logging, notifications, or external syncs.
  • Your use case tolerates minimal maintenance risk (last release: 2019) for a simple, MIT-licensed solution.
  • You want to avoid polling or manual checks for entity changes (e.g., no SELECT queries to compare old/new states).

• Look Elsewhere If:

  • You need pre-operation hooks (e.g., validation before saving) → Use Doctrine Lifecycle Callbacks or Symfony’s prePersist/preUpdate.
  • Your entities are high-frequency (e.g., bulk inserts) → The package adds event listener overhead; consider batch processing optimizations.
  • You require active maintenance (e.g., PHP 8+ support, bug fixes) → Evaluate forking or alternatives like Doctrine Extensions.
  • You need delete event support → This package only watches postPersist/postUpdate; use postRemove listeners separately.
  • You’re using non-Doctrine ORMs (e.g., Eloquent, Propel) → This is a hard blocker.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

For Executives: "This package lets us automatically react to critical data changes—like role updates or email modifications—without manual checks. For example, we could auto-generate audit logs or trigger notifications when sensitive fields change, reducing compliance risks and operational overhead. It’s a lightweight, low-risk way to add event-driven logic to our Doctrine entities. The tradeoff? Minimal maintenance risk (last updated 2019) for a simple, MIT-licensed solution that avoids reinventing the wheel."

For Engineers: *"Doctrine Watcher lets you subscribe to changes on specific entity properties (e.g., User::email) with callbacks for postPersist/postUpdate. It’s a drop-in event subscriber that avoids custom event listeners for property-level tracking. Useful for:

• Audit trails: Log who changed what and when.
• Side effects: Sync external systems or invalidate caches.
• Validation: Post-save checks (e.g., 'did the email actually change?'). Configurable to ignore no-changes cases or trigger on inserts. Downside: Unmaintained but stable for PHP 7.1+. Example:

$watcher->watch(User::class, 'email', function ($changeset, $operation, User $user) {
    if ($changeset->hasChanges()) {
        // Trigger logic here
    }
});
```*
**For Product Managers**:
*"This enables us to build features like:
- **Automated compliance logs** for regulated data (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA).
- **Real-time notifications** when critical fields change (e.g., user status updates).
- **Decoupled workflows** (e.g., 'if `Order::status` changes to `shipped`, update inventory').
No need for manual checks or polling—just register a watcher and let Doctrine handle the rest."*