I have several entities with several relations. They have one "starting" entity. When I want to persist data to my database, I set the data to each entity (implicitly with a method I wrote, because I import that data from an xml), but only persist and flush the main entity. I used cascade:persist in the entities accordingly. And all that works just fine.
But: There are entities (the OneToMany side) that should check in the database, whether or not the record already exists and only set a new record, if not. And if the record exists the ManyToOne side should get that foreign key, that already exists.
Is there an easy way to tell doctrine to do so on my single persist/flush of the main entity?
edit
Maybe I can simplify the question to:
Is it possible to flush an object and doctrine will check if this record already exists in the database (in one query)? Or do I have to do make a query to check for existing records first and then a second query with my data to be set?
edit end
Thanks a lot for your help
David
I'm building an app that allows a user to create reports for advertisers. The entities are set up so that there is a relation between the Report object and the Advertiser object - so that the advertiser has a getReports() method to get them.
I would like to change the app so that instead of actually deleting entities, that it simply changes a "deleted" property to true. That part is no problem, but I'm unsure how to make it so that the getReports() on the Advertiser entity only returns reports for the advertiser that have a deleted property of false.
Please let me know if you have any suggestions how that should be done in accordance with Symfony best practices.
You should look into Gedmo Doctrine Extensions. http://atlantic18.github.io/DoctrineExtensions/
Specifically for your case:
http://atlantic18.github.io/DoctrineExtensions/doc/softdeleteable.html
TLDR; they allow you to configure behavior of your entities in a way you desire, so for example when you "delete" an entity, Gedmo's listeners would set it's deleted value to a current datetime. Now you'd still have that record in your database but with not null value of deleted column marking it 'soft deleted', so when querying, it wouldn't be returned (because Doctrine knows how to query these stuff and would add a condition i.e.: ... where deleted ...) unless you explicitly say you want to see those soft deleted records.
I have an existing view in my SQL database "view_account" which represents a account entity. This view is read only and has no primary_key field. Actually it has a primary key "id" but the field is not declared as primary key. I can also not change the table design, because its an automatic export from another application generating this tables (the automatic export is every week).
But thats not the problem cause doctrine don't care about "primary key" flag in the database until you don't update the schema.
But whenever i try to "doctrine:schema:update --force" doctrine wants to create this table. How can i ignore this view (or better the entity) from updating by doctrine? Marking the entity read_only with doctrine annotation is not working. Extending a own update-command will also not work, as i found out, it will not work since doctrine 2.4.7 to extend the doctrine-schema-update command (the update command method is ignored in any way).
Whats the best solution?
Edit:
I also tried to configure two entitymanager. One for the "internal" entities and for the "foreign" entities. Since all entities are linked to each other on some point, it is also not possible to have two separated manager don't knowing from each other entities.
In my app, I have a few entities that share some common properties. Example entities:
Image
Video
Event
ForumPost
I want these classes to share some common functions, such as:
Have a list of comments, as well as keep counts of comments
Voting
List of subscribers and subscriber counts
View counts
etc..
I really would not want duplicate these functions for each of the entities above. So... I've been reading about Doctrine inheritance mapping and I've come up with an idea that "Class Table Inheritance" is the most elegant way to solve this. The plan was as follows:
Create a parent Post entity
/**
* #ORM\Entity
* #ORM\InheritanceType("JOINED")
* #ORM\DiscriminatorColumn(name="type", type="string")
*/
class Post
{
protected $likeCount;
protected $subscriberCount;
protected $subscribers;
// ...
}
Have many-to-one relations of likes, comments, votes, etc to Post entity:
class PostLike
{
/**
* #ORM\ManyToOne(targetEntity="Post")
* #ORM\JoinColumn(name="post_id", referencedColumnName="id", nullable=false)
*/
protected $post;
}
Have the Image, Video, etc entity extend Post:
class Video extends Post
{
// Post properties become available here
}
All worked like charm until I looked at the actual queries Doctrine is executing. The problem is: whenever I select a PostLike, doctrine will eager-load Post entity as well, which will in turn join all the child tables as well. So for example, a simple PostLike remove operation triggers a join on 4 tables and will actually join even more tables as my hierarchy grows.
If I have 10 entities extending Post, that would make a join on 10 tables. I am not a fan of premature optimization, but this just doesn't sound like a good plan.
In Doctrine documentation, this behavior is actually mentioned at "6.3.2. Performance impact".
Finally, my question: What are my other options to create reusable tables with doctrine?
I was thinking to do a One-To-One mapping (Post entity being a property of the Video, as well as the Image, etc), but I've read in a few blogs that One-to-One should be avoided with doctrine also for performance reasons.
thanks!
Edit and ansewer to Raphaël Malié regarding Mapped Superclasses:
I am aware that I can use Mapped Superclass and Trait features to avoid code duplication. However, these features allow me to reuse the code but don't allow me to reuse sql tables. Here is an example:
Say I want Image, Video and Event entities to have comments. I can create one Mapped Superclass AbstractComment and then extend it in ImageComment, VideoComment, EventComment. Next, I want to add comment votes. Since I can't reuse same sql table, I will need to create ImageCommentVote, VideoCommentVote, EventCommentVote, etc. Then I want users to be able to report abusive comments. There goes again: ImageCommentReport, VideoCommentReport, EventCommentReport. You get the idea. Every feature that I want to add to comment will need a separate table for each entity like image, video, etc. Lots of tables.
The reasons why I prefer to use centralized approach instead of using traits with many tables:
Easier administration. I can easily search/edit/delete comments of the entire app by sending a query to one table.
The same controller can handle actions for multiple entities, no need to create one abstract and many concrete controllers
Showing user notifications about new comments/likes etc is MUCH easier when actions are centralized.
I am also aware of the drawbacks of such system, but I can live with them for now. My question is how to get Doctrine to do what I want without actually joining everything when not necessary.
In my opinion you are doing wrong. Your entities have nothing in common, except some functionalities, so there is no reason to use single table or class table inheritance.
You should use Traits: http://php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.traits.php
It works with Doctrine. You define one or several traits with some properties / methods with annotations, and then you import these traits in your entities.
You can also use a Mapped Superclass : http://doctrine-orm.readthedocs.org/projects/doctrine-orm/en/latest/reference/inheritance-mapping.html#mapped-superclasses which is quite close to your example, but with a different entity annotation.
After some thought, your decision really depends on the size of your database. If it is big the performance hit of the Class Tabel approach might be unacceptable. But if your tables are small, the performance hit is minor and you can use all the advantages of Class Table Inheritance, which you discussed yourself in your post.
I want to log all changes of an entity. I looked into Loggable doctrine extension as provided by the StofDoctrineExtensionsBundle.
I got it working for fields that store simple data, e.g. string and integers. But my entity also has ManyToMany relationship to another entity, e.g. Tags.
I am getting this error:
InvalidMappingException: Cannot versioned [tags] as it is collection in object - Hn\AssetDbBundle\Entity\Asset
Is there a way to log an entity with its relationships? I don't mind switching to another bundle.
Currently no bundles/extensions have this functionality out of the box. One option would be to implement it yourself. This can be done by making use of Doctrine Listeners. Particularly you need to listen to postUpdate and postPersist events - these happen when entity is updated and created and store your Tags there.
Another option is to get rid of ManyToMany relationship. For this create an intermediate entity AssetTag that would have OneToMany relationship to both Asset and Tag. After this is done, you can use EntityAudit Doctrine Extension, which supports this type of relationships.