# Eager Beaver plugin for Craft CMS 3.x

Allows you to eager load elements from auto-injected Entry elements on demand from your templates.

Related: Eager Beaver for Craft 2.6.x

Learn More: Speed up your Craft CMS Templates with Eager Loading

# Requirements

This plugin requires Craft CMS 3.0.0 or later.

# Installation

To install the plugin, follow these instructions.

1. Open your terminal and go to your Craft project:

    cd /path/to/project
   

2. Then tell Composer to load the plugin:

    composer require nystudio107/craft-eagerbeaver
   

3. Install the plugin via ./craft install/plugin eager-beaver via the CLI, or in the Control Panel, go to Settings → Plugins and click the “Install” button for Eager Beaver.

# Eager Beaver Overview

Craft's Eager-Loading Elements allows you to nicely optimize your templates by telling Craft to load everything you need in one big query.

The only rub is that you can't specify this eager loading behavior for entry, category, or product elements that are auto-injected into your template.

Eager Beaver is a small plugin that allows you to eager load sub-elements like Assets, Categories, Users, etc. to these auto-injected elements.

This is especially useful if you have pages that use Matrix block "content builders", and thus will typically result in loading a number of relations like Assets contained in Matrix blocks to render a page.

# Do It Natively

Note that on Craft 3, you can do the exact same thing that the Eager Beaver plugin does by using craft.app.elements.eagerLoadElements:

{% do craft.app.elements.eagerLoadElements(
    className(entry),
    [entry],
    ['assetsField', 'categoriesField.assetField', 'matrixField.blockType:assetsField']
) %}

The first parameter is the class name of the element type we're eager loading elements into (in this case, an entry). The second parameter is an array of elements we're eager loading elements into (in this case, an array with just our entry in it). Finally, the third parameter is dot-notation of what elements we want to eager load. c.f.: eagerLoadElements()

# Configuring Eager Beaver

There's nothing to configure.

# Using Eager Beaver

To use Eager Beaver, simply do something like:

{% do eagerLoadElements(entry, [
    'author.userPicture',
    'blogCategory',
    'blogImage',
    'blogContent.image:image'
]) %}

Or you can use the more verbose syntax to do the same thing:

{% do craft.eagerBeaver.eagerLoadElements(entry, [
    'author.userPicture',
    'blogCategory',
    'blogImage',
    'blogContent',
    'blogContent.image:image'
]) %}

The first parameter is the Element or array of Elements that you want to eager-load sub-elements into, such as an entry. If you pass in an array of Elements, they must all be the same type.

The second parameter is the same with: that you use for Eager-Loading Elements, and uses the exact same syntax.

In the above example:

• author is a User that has an Assets field named userPicture added to it.
• blogCategory is a Category field
• blogImage is an Asset field
• blogContent is a Matrix field that has an Assets field named image added to the block type image

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