This presentation was used in the first Symfony Cafe Kyiv event and discussed the various tips and tricks one might need when working with Doctrine.

1. Doctrine Tips’n’Tricks
(Ilya Antipenko, Grossum)

2. HOW TO ADD RELATIONSHIP FROM INVERSED SIDE?
• User YML config contains:
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3. HOW TO ADD RELATIONSHIP FROM INVERSED SIDE?
• What will we get in profile table?
• Why? Doctrine documentation:
– Doctrine will only check the owning side of an association for changes.
– Changes made only to the inverse side of an association are ignored. Make sure
to update both sides of a bidirectional association (or at least the owning side,
from Doctrine’s point of view)
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4. HOW TO FIX THIS BEHAVIOR?
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5. HOW TO REMOVE ITEM FROM ONE-TO-MANY COLLECTION?
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6. HOW TO REMOVE ITEM FROM ONE-TO-MANY COLLECTION?
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o We should use “orphan removal” pattern to remove item from collection

7. INHERITANCE
• Mapped Superclasses
• Single Table Inheritance
• Class Table Inheritance
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8. INHERITANCE. MAPPED SUPERCLASSES.
• Abstract
• Unidirectional relationships only => One-To-Many are not possible
• Many-To-Many associations are only possible if the mapped
superclass is only used in exactly one entity at the moment.
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9. INHERITANCE. SINGLE TABLE INHERITANCE.
• All classes of hierarchy are mapped to a single table
• All fields, added to hierarchy entity, will be added to this single table
– Employee entity extended by Person
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10. INHERITANCE. SINGLE TABLE INHERITANCE.
• After execute code:
• Table “person_single_table” contain two records for Employee and
Person entities:
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11. INHERITANCE. SINGLE TABLE INHERITANCE.
• This strategy is very efficient for querying across all types in the
hierarchy or for specific types.
• No table joins are required, only a WHERE clause listing the type
identifiers. In particular, relationships involving types that employ this
mapping strategy are very performant.
• Otherwise Doctrine CANNOT create proxy instances of this entity and
will ALWAYS load the entity eagerly.
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12. INHERITANCE. CLASS TABLE INHERITANCE.
• Several tables. One table for base entity and tables for each child
entity.
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13. INHERITANCE. CLASS TABLE INHERITANCE.
• After execute code:
• Table “person_joined”:
• Table “employee_joined”:
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14. INHERITANCE. CLASS TABLE INHERITANCE.
• This strategy inherently requires multiple JOIN operations to
perform just about any query which can have a negative impact on
performance.
• Doctrine CANNOT create proxy instances of this entity and will
ALWAYS load the entity eagerly.
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15. COMPOSITE AND FOREIGN KEYS AS PRIMARY KEY
• Only allowed on Many-To-One or One-To-One associations.
• Set a key associationKey: with the field name of the association in
YAML.
• 3 USE-CASES:
– Dynamic Attributes
– Simple Derived Identity
– Join-Table with Metadata
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16. Composite and Foreign Keys as Primary Key
DYNAMIC ATTRIBUTES
ArticleAttribute:
type: entity
id:
article:
associationKey: true
attribute:
type: string
fields:
value:
type: string
manyToOne:
article:
targetEntity: Article
inversedBy: attributes
Article:
type: entity
id:
id:
type: integer
generator:
strategy: AUTO
oneToMany:
targetEntity: ArticleAttribute
mappedBy: article
indexBy: attribute
cascade:
- all
Usage:
class Article
{
…
public function addAttribute($name,
$value)
{
$this->attributes[$name] = new
ArticleAttribute($name, $value, $this);
}
...
}
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17. Composite and Foreign Keys as Primary Key
SIMPLE DERIVED IDENTITY
• Sometimes you have the requirement that two objects are related by a One-
To-One association and that the dependent class should re-use the primary
key of the class it depends on.
• We encounter problems with SonataORMAdminBundle
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User:
type: entity
id:
id:
type: integer
generator:
strategy: AUTO
Address:
type: entity
id:
user:
associationKey:
true
oneToOne:
user:
targetEntity: User

18. Composite and Foreign Keys as Primary Key
JOIN-TABLE WITH METADATA
Order:
type: entity
id:
id:
type: integer
generator:
strategy: AUTO
manyToOne:
targetEntity: Customer
oneToMany:
targetEntity: OrderItem
mappedBy: order
Product:
type: entity
id:
id:
type: integer
generator:
strategy: AUTO
fields:
name:
type: string
price:
type: decimal
OrderItem:
type: entity
id:
order:
associationKey: true
product:
associationKey: true
manyToOne:
order:
targetEntity: Order
product:
targetEntity: Product
fields:
amount:
type: integer
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19. THANKS!
ILYA ANTIPENKO
Company: Grossum
E-mail: ilya@antipenko.pp.ua
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Examples seen in presentation can be found here:
github.com/aivus/doctrine-tips-n-tricks