Symfony2 entity relationships not working as expected - symfony

Question

This is either a huge bug in Symfony2 or I'm just not getting it. I've spent literally days trying to understand what is going on here. I have two entities:
Event
Date
I want a relationship where there are many dates to one event. Sounds simple enough, so in my Event entity I have:
/**
* #ORM\OneToMany(targetEntity="Date", mappedBy="event")
*/
protected $dates;
And in my Date entity I have:
/**
* #ORM\ManyToOne(targetEntity="Event", inversedBy="dates")
*/
private $event;
I have also generated a CRUD (doctrine:generate:crud) on the Event entity so that I may add events to the database. In the form builder in my EventType I have added:
->add('date', new DateType())
This is so that I may include the date field in the form, as per the Symfony documentation.
Now comes my problem.
Whenever I run doctrine:generate:entities my entities are created on the Event and Date entity, but they seem to be the wrong way around. On my Event entity I get:
/**
* Constructor
*/
public function __construct()
{
$this->dates = new \Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection();
}
/**
* Add dates
*
* #param \Raygun\EventBundle\Entity\Date $dates
* #return Event
*/
public function addDate(\Raygun\EventBundle\Entity\Date $dates)
{
$this->dates[] = $dates;
return $this;
}
/**
* Remove dates
*
* #param \Raygun\EventBundle\Entity\Date $dates
*/
public function removeDate(\Raygun\EventBundle\Entity\Date $dates)
{
$this->dates->removeElement($dates);
}
/**
* Get dates
*
* #return \Doctrine\Common\Collections\Collection
*/
public function getDates()
{
return $this->dates;
}
and on my Date entity I get:
/**
* Set event
*
* #param \Raygun\EventBundle\Entity\Event $event
* #return Date
*/
public function setEvent(\Raygun\EventBundle\Entity\Event $event = null)
{
$this->event = $event;
return $this;
}
/**
* Get event
*
* #return \Raygun\EventBundle\Entity\Event
*/
public function getEvent()
{
return $this->event;
}
Now when I try to load the form so I can add the event/date to the database I get
Neither the property "date" nor one of the methods "getDate()", "date()", "isDate()", "hasDate()", "__get()" exist and have public access in class "Raygun\EventBundle\Entity\Event".
It's like it should be adding getters and setters to the Event entity, NOT the Date entity. I'm really tearing my hair out with this and am thinking of ditching Symfony entirely, as it seems to go completely against logic.

Answer 1

if you want Form component automatically mappes the fields you should change date field to dates:
->add('dates', 'collection', [
'type' => new DateType()
])
or you can add mapped => false option to your date field to map it manually.

Answer 2

Your Event form type should contain a collection type for the protected $dates field, so this line is incorrect:
->add('date', new DateType())
It should be:
->add('dates', 'collection', array('type' => new DateType()))
Please have a look at this Symfony cookbook entry on how to work with form collections:
http://symfony.com/doc/current/cookbook/form/form_collections.html