How to make multiple table connections in symfony2 Repository ? Entity? - symfony

Question

I have tables like
profile status
Profile.class
id name
1 taro
2 jiro
3 john
Status.class
id profile school date
1 1 highschool 2017-04-01
2 1 juniorhighschool 2013-04-01
3 2 highschool 2017-04-01
Status is added when status changes.
So I normally choose latest status every time I need status.
$ss = $this->em->createQuery(
"SELECT cm FROM UserBundle:Status s where c.profile = :p order by desc")
->setParameters(['p' => $profile])->getResult();
$ss[0] // Latest Status
So now I would like to put this in function.
What I want to do is getting latest status from profile.
I have a few ideas
Put this function in Profile Entity?
put this function in Profile Repository?
put this function in service???
In my opinion it should be the feature of Profile Entity, So I would like to put this in Entity though, access another from an Entity is bad manner.
Is it OK to access another entity from a Profile Repository??
Or should I use service??

Answer 1

You can achieve this with a method in ProfileRepository
<?php
public function getLastStatusByProfile(Profile $profile)
{
// do our query from Profile with a join on Status
}
And please, use a LIMIT 1 on your query, you only need the last result

Answer 2

You cannot put this in an Entity because Entities cannot be injected the Doctrine EntityManager dependency ($this->em).
To perform your "getLatestStatus()" function you need the EntityManager $this->em.
To access the EntityManager you can:
get it from the container in a Command or a Controller (e.g. in a Controller $this->get('doctrine')->getManager();)
inject it into a Service using Dependency Injection configuration files (see http://symfony.com/doc/current/service_container.html#injecting-services-config-into-a-service)
use it in a Repository because Repositories have native access to it
Usually people put functions such as getLatestStatus() in a repository, the repository becomes "the class where we put all DQL queries" and this works quite fine. This is recommanded by the official Documentation (https://symfony.com/doc/current/doctrine/repository.html) "Methods containing your query logic can then be stored in this class."
It is usual in Symfony Applications to have:
Entities having only properties, getters, setters, and some additionnal logical functions (like activate(), disable() ... functions that modify the Entity properties)
Repositories to hold DQL queries with complex logic such as getLatestStatus()
Services to hold other any other functions that read / modify data
Controllers are only gateways to use Services
So one complete example would be:
<?php
class ProfileRepository extends EntityRepository
{
/**
* #param Profile $profile
*
* #return Status
*/
public function getLatestStatus($profile)
{
$qb = $this->getEntityManager()->createQuery(
"SELECT cm FROM UserBundle:Status s where c.profile = :p order by desc")
->setParameters(['p' => $profile])
->getResult();
return $result;
}
}
And do not forget to handle the case where there is no "status" available for this profile. Do you wish to return null, raise an Exception or return a default status ?