Naming

DefaultNamingStrategy derives a table name from the class's short name and a column name from the property name. Either can be overridden per class with #[Entity(table: ...)] or per property with #[Column(column: ...)].

Columns

A property name is snake-cased.

Property	Column
id	id
displayName	display_name
HTTPStatus	http_status

An acronym keeps together: the boundary is placed before the last capital of a run, so HTTPStatus does not become h_t_t_p_status.

Tables

A class's short name is snake-cased and then pluralised. The namespace is not part of it.

Class	Table
Article	articles
UserProfile	user_profiles
HTTPRequest	http_requests
Oauth2Client	oauth2_clients
Category	categories
Day	days
Status	statuses
Box	boxes
Church	churches
Dish	dishes
Person	people
SalesPerson	sales_people
Series	series
Analysis	analyses

The rules, in the order they are tried:

1. An irregular plural, matched on the whole name or on its last underscored word. That is what turns sales_person into sales_people.
2. A consonant before a final y becomes ies, so category pluralises and day does not.
3. A name ending in s, x, z, ch or sh takes es.
4. Everything else takes s.

The irregular list covers person, child, man, woman, mouse, goose, tooth, foot, ox, analysis, basis, crisis, thesis, deer, sheep, species and series.

tip

The list is deliberately short. English pluralisation has no end of special cases, and a name the strategy gets wrong is better fixed with #[Entity(table: 'people')] on that one class than by growing a dictionary every application pays for.

Replacing the convention

NamingStrategy has two methods. Implement it and pass it to the MetadataFactory.

use Dirthara\Entity\Naming\NamingStrategy;

final readonly class SingularTableNaming implements NamingStrategy
{
    public function table(string $entityShortName): string
    {
        return strtolower($entityShortName);
    }

    public function column(string $property): string
    {
        return $property;
    }
}

$factory = new MetadataFactory(new SingularTableNaming(), $types);

Method	Receives	Returns
table(string $entityShortName)	The class's short name, without its namespace.	The table name.
column(string $property)	The property name.	The column name.

A strategy is only consulted where an attribute did not already answer, so #[Column(column: 'display_name')] wins over whatever column() would say.