How to properly use postUpdate, postRemove, postPersist in Doctrine? - symfony

Question

The documentation says: https://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-orm/en/2.7/reference/events.html#postupdate-postremove-postpersist
The three post events are called inside EntityManager#flush(). Changes in here are not relevant to the persistence in the database, but you can use these events to alter non-persistable items, like non-mapped fields, logging or even associated classes that are not directly mapped by Doctrine.
So let's imagine I have an Image entity:
<?php
/**
* #ORM\Entity
*/
class Image
{
/**
* #var int|null
* #ORM\Id
* #ORM\GeneratedValue(strategy="IDENTITY")
* #ORM\Column(type="integer")
*/
private ?int $id = null;
/**
* #var string
* #ORM\Column(type="string")
*/
private string $path;
/**
* #var string
* #ORM\Column(type="string")
*/
private string $status = 'RECEIVED';
}
Once I flush my Image entity I want to upload the corresponding file on a FTP server, so I do it in the postPersist event.
But if the upload on FTP fail I want to change the status of my Image to FTP_ERROR.
<?php
public function postPersist(Image $image, LifecycleEventArgs $event)
{
$em = $event->getEntityManager();
try {
$this->someService->uploadToFtp($image);
} catch (Exception $e) {
$image->setStatus('FTP_ERROR');
$em->persist($image);
$em->flush();
}
}
And it works, but as documentation says it's not a good way to do it.
I have seen this post: Flushing in postPersist possible or not? which says:
#iiirxs:
It is ok to call flush() on a PostPersist lifecycle callback in order to change a mapped property of your entity.
So how to do so? #iiirxs and the documentation say 2 different things.

Answer 1

The best way to download something on such event as postPersist is using https://symfony.com/doc/current/components/messenger.html
so, you can create asynchronous task for file uploading and Symfony Messenger will be able to handle errors and retry it automatically on fail, also you will be able to update it, status and etc in separate process and it will not depend on specific doctrine cases like case in your question.