Symfony 2 fetch data from many to many relationship with doctrine - symfony

Question

I'm stuck on getting this to work with Symfony2 and Doctrine, the situation:
A page with piercing info (general info and caretaking info).
A care taking can have multiple piercings to which it applies and a piercing can have multiple care takings
Database layout:
Piercings:
id
name
...
Caretaking:
id
title
description
piercing_to_caretaking
id
piercing_id
caretaking_id
Now, how would I create the Entity and the corresponding Query/Dql ?

Answer 1

If you are defining your entities using yml:
In Piercing.orm.yml add:
manyToMany:
caretakings:
targetEntity: Caretaking
inversedBy: piercings
joinTable:
name: piercing_caretaking
joinColumns:
caretaking:
referencedColumnName: id
inverseJoinColumns:
piercing:
referencedColumnName: id
In Caretaking.orm.yml add:
manyToMany:
piercings:
targetEntity: Piercing
mappedBy: caretakings
Generate/update the entities in the usual way, i.e.:
app/console doctrine:schema:update --dump-sql (to check results)
app/console doctrine:schema:update --force (to apply changes)
Then when you have a Piercing or Caretaking entity you can access the related entities like this:
$piercing->addCaretaking($caretaking);
$caretakings = $piercing->getCaretakings();
...
$piercings = $caretaking->getPiercings();
For more information, including how to do this using annotations, see sub-section 5.1.4 Many to Many, Bidirectional in Section 5 Association Mapping of the Doctrine documentation.