Setting a default value for a one-on-one association - symfony

Question

Doctrine is a beast in combination with Symfony, but I can't seem to find good examples on how to achieve what I need.
My user schema is pretty standard. I want to set a one-to-one association that points to the forum permission a user has.
For this to work, I need to create a "default entity" that holds the default permissions given to the user upon creation.
Here is the User#forumPermission association
/**
* #var $forumPermissions ?ForumPermission
* One User instance has One Forum Permission instance.
* #ORM\OneToOne(targetEntity="ForumPermission")
* #JoinColumn(name="forum_permission_id", referencedColumnName="id")
*/
private $forumPermission;
/**
* #return ForumPermission
*/
public function getForumPermission() : ?ForumPermission
{
return $this->forumPermission;
}
/**
* #param ForumPermission $forumPermission
*/
public function setForumPermission(ForumPermission $forumPermission): void
{
$this->forumPermission = $forumPermission;
}
This means the forum_permission table is empty at this time.
After that, I read in the doctrine docs that you can listen to all kinds of events related to flushing and persisting. Here is the docs sections for onFlush
This is what I came up with
public function onFlush(OnFlushEventArgs $eventArgs)
{
$em = $eventArgs->getEntityManager();
$uow = $em->getUnitOfWork();
foreach ($uow->getScheduledEntityInsertions() as $entity) {
/* #var $entity User */
if (true === $entity instanceof User
&& null === $entity->getForumPermission()) {
$entity->setForumPermission($this->getDefaultForumPermission($em, $uow));
}
}
}
private function getDefaultForumPermission(
\Doctrine\ORM\EntityManagerInterface $em,
\Doctrine\ORM\UnitOfWork $uow)
{
// Get the default permissions form the database
$defaultForumPermission = $em->getRepository(ForumPermission::class)->find(1);
// I will create a new entity if the default permissions do not exist
if (null === $defaultForumPermission) {
$defaultForumPermission = new ForumPermission();
$uow->persist($defaultForumPermission);
$uow->computeChangeSet($em->getClassMetadata('\App\Entity\ForumPermission'), $defaultForumPermission);
}
return $defaultForumPermission;
}
The docs aren't very clear on what you can do and where you should do it.
I figure I could do this all in the controller, but I like to keep everything where it belongs as intended by design.
So I'm wondering if this is the best way to do it, should I be doing this during prePersist or another event? Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

If I get it right, each time a User is created you want to create a new ForumPermission associated to this User. The best way to do it is to listen to the prePersist Doctrine event.
See https://symfony.com/doc/current/doctrine/event_listeners_subscribers.html for additional information.