Best practice Symfony2 entity management - symfony

Question

There is a lots of ways to manage entities in Symfony2, but I don't know which is the better
Solution 1: In the controller
public function myAction()
{
$myEntity = new MyEntity();
$form = $this->createForm($myEntityType, $myEntity);
...
if ($form->isValid()) {
$em = $this->getDoctrine()->getManager()
$em->persist($myEntity);
$em->flush()
}
...
}
Solution 2: Using custom entityManager
public function myAction()
{
$myEntityManager = $this->get('manager.my_entity');
$myEntity = $myEntityManager->create();
$form = $this->createForm($myEntityType, $myEntity);
...
if ($form->isValid()) {
$myEntityManager->update($myEntity);
}
...
}
Solution 3: Using factory
public function myAction()
{
$myEntityFactory = $this->get('factory.my_entity');
$myEntity = $myEntityFactory->create();
$form = $this->createForm($myEntityType, $myEntity);
...
if ($form->isValid()) {
$em = $this->getDoctrine()->getManager()
$em->persist($myEntity);
$em->flush()
}
...
}
I prefer the solution 2, but peoples told me this is not a single responsibility pattern because you have a factory and a method to update into it. The solution is maybe to use the factory in the manager, but it brings a lits of complexity.

Answer 1

Controller
public function myAction()
{
$myEntity = $this->get('entity_repository')->getBySomething();
$form = $this->createForm($myEntityType, $myEntity);
...
if ($form->isValid()) {
$this->get('entity_persister')->updateEntity($myEntity);
}
...
}
Your repository has the only responsability to give you model objects.
The domain service 'entity_persister' has the responsability to persist the given data to the model
Note that this solution is not the cleanest way because your form is directly mapped to an object representing the database table. I would recommend if you want to have a cleaner architecture to keep the model object and the object mapped by the form different.

Answer 2

Depends solely on a use case, IMO. There's no single "best way".
The question is: what do you actually do with this entity in your app? And how many times you need to access the same methods?
If only in one place, then creating a service or anything outside a controller could be totally uncessary.
Factory design pattern has its own usages, so it's a separate matter to be analysed (regardless the entity).
I'd go with 1st option for most of use cases, though, when you need to just create an Entity:
$myEntity = new MyEntity();
Why? Because code doesn't hide anything. Come on, MyEntity is just a Plain Object, it doesn't need any service or manager or (in most cases) factory. The other two seem to be a bad practice then, as they hide what is really going on there (unless Factory is needed).