Headless DB

For headless frontends, it may or may not be useful to have a pre-compiled data file instead of resorting to PHP for querying data. That said, the plaintext data.xml file that DOM ORM writes to, i exactly that.
So, you can also export into several formats such as JSON, YAML and more.

Excluding fields from exports

Mark any #[Fragment] property with #[Exclude] to omit it from all export formats. The field is still persisted to data.xml; it is only stripped during export.

use DOM\ORM\Mapping\Exclude;
use DOM\ORM\Mapping\Fragment;
use DOM\ORM\Mapping\Item;
use DOM\ORM\Entity\AbstractEntity;

#[Item(entityType: 'post')]
class Post extends AbstractEntity
{
    #[Fragment]
    public string $title = '';

    #[Fragment]
    public string $body = '';

    /** Internal property — not to be exposed in API exports. */
    #[Fragment]
    #[Exclude]
    public float $rankScore = 0.0;
}

Any field tagged #[Exclude] will be absent from every output format (--json, --yaml, --xml, --php).

Export formats

Run one or more --json, --yaml, --xml, or --php flags to produce output files alongside your XML store:

# Export as JSON and YAML (auto-named next to storage/data.xml)
./vendor/bin/dom-orm export --json --yaml

# Export to specific paths
./vendor/bin/dom-orm export --json /tmp/snapshot.json --yaml /tmp/snapshot.yaml

The exported shape is a flat, human-readable structure grouped by entity type:

{
  "user": [
    { "id": "uuid1", "type": "user", "name": "Alice", "createdAt": "2024-01-01T00:00:00+00:00" }
  ]
}