Symfony Database Cookbook

Creating classes with Doctrine

A command line shortcut for the process of creating an entity class described in Generating Database Tables and/or Schema:

$ php app/console doctrine:generate:entity --entity="AppBundle:Category" --fields="name:string(100)"

Specifying foreign keys between tables

First create a property within the category/group/type class that will hold the records linked to it.

// src/AppBundle/Entity/Category.php

// ...
use Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection;

class Category
{
	// ...

	/**
	 * @ORM\OneToMany(targetEntity="Product", mappedBy="category")
	 */
	protected $products;

	public function __construct()
	{
		$this->products = new ArrayCollection();
	}
}

Then add a property in the other class to reference the category/group/type class:

// src/AppBundle/Entity/Product.php

// ...
class Product
{
	// ...

	/**
	 * @ORM\ManyToOne(targetEntity="Category", inversedBy="products")
	 * @ORM\JoinColumn(name="category_id", referencedColumnName="id")
	 */
	protected $category;
}

Have Doctrine generate getter and setter methods:

$ php app/console doctrine:generate:entities Acme

Examples

• Tutorials database: Tutorial and TutorialGroup classes.

Selectively retrieving object properties

By default Doctrine retrieves all the properties for an object.

$qb = $em->createQueryBuilder();

// You can select multiple properties in the partial statement
$qb
    ->select('partial Article.{id,title,summary}')
    ->from('Entity\Article')
;

Controlling the order of associated entities

With a one-to-many relationship, display the groups, with the associated entities under each group.

In the group entity add an OrderBy annotation to the associated property:

/** 
	 * @var Array List of tutorials in this group. 
	 * @ORM\OneToMany(targetEntity="Tutorial", mappedBy="group")
	 * @ORM\OrderBy({"slot" = "ASC", "date" = "DESC"})
	 */
	public $tutorials;

See also

• DQL User-Defined Functions (wiki)
• Mastering Symfony2 Performance (Octivi.com)