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Projects / ORM / Documentation / Getting Started with Doctrine

3.0 Edit

Getting Started with Doctrine 

This guide covers getting started with the Doctrine ORM. After working through the guide you should know:

How to install and configure Doctrine by connecting it to a database

Mapping PHP objects to database tables
Generating a database schema from PHP objects
Using the EntityManager to insert, update, delete and find objects in the database.

Guide Assumptions 
This guide is designed for beginners that haven't worked with Doctrine ORM before. There are some prerequisites for the
tutorial that have to be installed:

PHP (latest stable version)

Composer Package Manager (Install Composer )

The code of this tutorial is available on Github.

 This tutorial assumes you work with Doctrine 2.4 and above. Some of the code will not work with lower versions.

What is Doctrine? 
Doctrine 2 is an object-relational mapper (ORM) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-relational_mapping> for PHP 5.4+ that
provides transparent persistence for PHP objects. It uses the Data Mapper pattern at the heart, aiming for a complete
separation of your domain/business logic from the persistence in a relational database management system.

The benefit of Doctrine for the programmer is the ability to focus on the object-oriented business logic and worry about
persistence only as a secondary problem. This doesn't mean persistence is downplayed by Doctrine 2, however it is our belief
that there are considerable benefits for object-oriented programming if persistence and entities are kept separated.

What are Entities? 

Entities are PHP Objects that can be identified over many requests by a unique identifier or primary key. These classes don't
need to extend any abstract base class or interface.

An entity contains persistable properties. A persistable property is an instance variable of the entity that is saved into and
retrieved from the database by Doctrine's data mapping capabilities.

An entity class must not be final, although it can contain final methods.

An Example Model: Bug Tracker 

For this Getting Started Guide for Doctrine we will implement the Bug Tracker domain model from the Zend\_Db\_Table
documentation. Reading their documentation we can extract the requirements:

A Bug has a description, creation date, status, reporter and engineer

A Bug can occur on different Products (platforms)
A Product has a name.
Bug reporters and engineers are both Users of the system.
A User can create new Bugs.
The assigned engineer can close a Bug.
A User can see all his reported or assigned Bugs.
Bugs can be paginated through a list-view.

Project Setup 
Getting Started with Doctrine
Create a new empty folder for this tutorial project, for example doctrine2-tutorial and create a new file composer.json with
the following contents:
Guide Assumptions
What is Doctrine?
{
An Example Model: Bug Tracker
"require": {
Project Setup "doctrine/orm": "2.4.*"
Obtaining the EntityManager },
Generating the Database Schema "autoload": {
Starting with the Product Entity "psr-0": {"": "src/"}
Adding Bug and User Entities
}
}
Implementing more Requirements
Queries for Application Use-Cases
Install Doctrine using the Composer Dependency Management tool, by calling:
Dashboard of the User
Top
Number of Bugs
$ composer install
Updating Entities

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Entity Repositories This will install the packages Doctrine Common, Doctrine DBAL, Doctrine ORM and Symfony Console into the `vendor`
Conclusion directory. The Symfony dependencies are not required by Doctrine but will be used in this tutorial.

Getting Started: Database First Add the following directories:

Getting Started: Model First

doctrine2-tutorial
|-- config
Working with Indexed Associations
`-- src

Extra Lazy Associations

Composite and Foreign Keys as Primary Obtaining the EntityManager 

Key
Doctrine's public interface is through the EntityManager. This class provides access points to the complete lifecycle
management for your entities, and transforms entities from and back to persistence. You have to configure and create it to
Ordering To-Many Associations
use your entities with Doctrine 2. I will show the configuration steps and then discuss them step by step:
Override Field Association Mappings In
Subclasses <?php
// bootstrap.php
Pagination use Doctrine\ORM\Tools\Setup;
use Doctrine\ORM\EntityManager;
Separating Concerns using
Embeddables require_once "vendor/autoload.php";

Initializing embeddables // Create a simple "default" Doctrine ORM configuration for Annotations
$isDevMode = true;
Column Prefixing $config = Setup::createAnnotationMetadataConfiguration(array(__DIR__."/src"), $isDevMode);
// or if you prefer XML
DQL //$config = Setup::createXMLMetadataConfiguration(array(__DIR__."/config"), $isDevMode);
// database configuration parameters
Reference $conn = array(
'driver' => 'pdo_sqlite',
Architecture 'path' => __DIR__ . '/db.sqlite',
);
Installation and Configuration
// obtaining the entity manager
Frequently Asked Questions $entityManager = EntityManager::create($conn, $config);

Basic Mapping
The require_once statement sets up the class autoloading for Doctrine and its dependencies using Composer's autoloader.
Association Mapping
The second block consists of the instantiation of the ORM Configuration object using the Setup helper. It assumes a bunch of
defaults that you don't have to bother about for now. You can read up on the configuration details in the reference chapter
Inheritance Mapping
on configuration.
Working with Objects
The third block shows the configuration options required to connect to a database. In this case, we'll use a file-based SQLite
Working with Associations database. All the configuration options for all the shipped drivers are given in the DBAL Configuration section of the manual.

Events The last block shows how the EntityManager is obtained from a factory method.

Doctrine Internals explained

Generating the Database Schema 
Association Updates: Owning Side and
Doctrine has a command-line interface that allows you to access the SchemaTool, a component that can generate a relational
database schema based entirely on the defined entity classes and their metadata. For this tool to work, a cli-config.php file
must exist in the project root directory:

<?php
// cli-config.php
require_once "bootstrap.php";

return \Doctrine\ORM\Tools\Console\ConsoleRunner::createHelperSet($entityManager);

Change into your project directory and call the Doctrine command-line tool:

$ cd project/
$ vendor/bin/doctrine orm:schema-tool:create

Since we haven't added any entity metadata in `src` yet, you'll see a message stating "No Metadata Classes to process." In the
next section, we'll create a Product entity along with the corresponding metadata, and run this command again.

Note that as you modify your entities' metadata during the development process, you'll need to update your database
schema to stay in sync with the metadata. You can rasily recreate the database using the following commands:

$ vendor/bin/doctrine orm:schema-tool:drop --force

$ vendor/bin/doctrine orm:schema-tool:create

Or you can use the update functionality:

$ vendor/bin/doctrine orm:schema-tool:update --force

The updating of databases uses a Diff Algorithm for a given Database Schema. This is a cornerstone of the Doctrine\DBAL
package, which can even be used without the Doctrine ORM package. Top

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Starting with the Product Entity 

We start with the simplest entity, the Product. Create a src/Product.php file to contain the Product entity definition:

<?php
// src/Product.php
class Product
{
/**
* @var int
*/
private $id;
/**
* @var string
*/
private $name;
}

When creating entity classes, all of the fields should be private.

Use protected when strictly needed and very rarely if not ever public.

Adding behavior to Entities 

There are two options to define methods in entities: getters/setters, or mutators and DTOs, respectively for anemic entities
or rich entities.

Anemic entities: Getters and setters

The most popular method is to create two kinds of methods to read (getter) and update (setter) the object's properties.

Some fields such as $id are unlikely to be changed, so it is ok to omit them.

 Doctrine ORM does not use any of the methods you defined: it uses reflection to read and write values to your
objects, and will never call methods, not even __construct.

This approach is mostly used when you want to focus on behavior-less entities, and when you want to have all your business
logic in your services rather than in the objects themselves.

Getters and setters are a common convention which makes it possible to expose each field of your entity to the external
world, while allowing you to keep some type safety in place.

Such an approach is a good choice for RAD (rapid application development), but may lead to problems later down the road,
because providing such an easy way to modify any field in your entity means that the entity itself cannot guarantee validity of
its internal state. Having any object in invalid state is dangerous:

An invalid state can bring bugs in your business logic.

The state can be implicitly saved in the database: any forgotten flush can persist the broken state.
If persisted, the corrupted data will be retrieved later in your application when the data is loaded again, thereby leading
to bugs in your business logic.
When bugs occur after corrupted data is persisted, troubleshooting will become much harder, and you might be aware
of the bug too late to fix it in a proper manner.

 This method, although very common, is inappropriate for Domain Driven Design (`DDD
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-driven_design>`) where methods should represent real business operations and
not simple property change, And business invariants should be maintained both in the application state (entities in this
case) and in the database, with no space for data corruption.

Here is an example of a simple anemic entity:

PHP

<?php
class User
{
private $username;
private $passwordHash;
private $bans;

public function getUsername(): string

{
return $this->username;
}

public function setUsername(string $username): void

{
$this->username = $username;
}

public function getPasswordHash(): string Top

{

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return $this->passwordHash;
}

public function setPasswordHash(string $passwordHash): void

{
$this->passwordHash = $passwordHash;
}

public function getBans(): array

{
return $this->bans;
}

public function addBan(Ban $ban): void

{
$this->bans[] = $ban;
}
}

In the example above, we avoid all possible logic in the entity and only care about putting and retrieving data into it without
validation (except the one provided by type-hints) nor consideration about the object's state.

As Doctrine ORM is a persistence tool for your domain, the state of an object is really important. This is why we strongly
recommend using rich entities.

Rich entities: Mutators and DTOs

We recommend using a rich entity design and rely on more complex mutators, and if needed based on DTOs. In this design,
you should not use getters nor setters, and instead, implement methods that represent the behavior of your domain.

For example, when having a User entity, we could foresee the following kind of optimization.

Example of a rich entity with proper accessors and mutators:

PHP

<?php
class User
{
private $banned;
private $username;
private $passwordHash;
private $bans;

public function toNickname(): string

{
return $this->username;
}

public function authenticate(string $password, callable $checkHash): bool

{
return $checkHash($password, $this->passwordHash) && ! $this->hasActiveBans();
}

public function changePassword(string $password, callable $hash): void

{
$this->passwordHash = $hash($password);
}

public function ban(\DateInterval $duration): void

{
assert($duration->invert !== 1);

$this->bans[] = new Ban($this);

}
}

 Please note that this example is only a stub. When going further in the documentation, we will update this object
with more behavior and maybe update some methods.

The entities should only mutate state after checking that all business logic invariants are being respected. Additionally, our
entities should never see their state change without validation. For example, creating a new Product() object without any data
makes it an invalid object. Rich entities should represent behavior, not data, therefore they should be valid even after a
__construct() call.

To help creating such objects, we can rely on DTOs, and/or make our entities always up-to-date. This can be performed with
static constructors, or rich mutators that accept DTOs as parameters.

The role of the DTO is to maintain the entity's state and to help us rely upon objects that correctly represent the data that is
used to mutate the entity.

 A `DTO <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_transfer_object>` is an object that only carries data without any logic. Its
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only goal is to be transferred from one service to another. A DTO often represents data sent by a client and that has to
be validated, but can also be used as simple data carrier for other cases.

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By using DTOs, if we take our previous User example, we could create a ProfileEditingForm DTO that will be a plain model,
totally unrelated to our database, that will be populated via a form and validated. Then we can add a new mutator to our User:

PHP

<?php
class User
{
public function updateFromProfile(ProfileEditingDTO $profileFormDTO): void
{
// ...
}

public static function createFromRegistration(UserRegistrationDTO $registrationDTO): self

{
// ...
}
}

There are several advantages to using such a model:

Entity state is always valid. Since no setters exist, this means that we only update portions of the entity that should
already be valid.
Instead of having plain getters and setters, our entity now has real behavior: it is much easier to determine the logic in
the domain.
DTOs can be reused in other components, for example deserializing mixed content, using forms...
Classic and static constructors can be used to manage different ways to create our objects, and they can also use DTOs.
Anemic entities tend to isolate the entity from logic, whereas rich entities allow putting the logic in the object itself,
including data validation.

The next step for persistence with Doctrine is to describe the structure of the Product entity to Doctrine using a metadata
language. The metadata language describes how entities, their properties and references should be persisted and what
constraints should be applied to them.

Metadata for an Entity can be configured using DocBlock annotations directly in the Entity class itself, or in an external XML
file. This Getting Started guide will demonstrate metadata mappings using two methods, but you only need to choose one.

PHP XML

<?php
// src/Product.php

use Doctrine\ORM\Annotation as ORM;

/**
* @ORM\Entity @ORM\Table(name="products")
**/
class Product
{
/** @ORM\Id @ORM\Column(type="integer") @ORM\GeneratedValue **/
private $id;

/** @ORM\Column(type="string") **/

private $name;

// .. (other code)
}

The top-level entity definition tag specifies information about the class and table-name. The primitive type Product#name is
defined as a field attribute. The id property is defined with the id tag. It has a generator tag nested inside, which specifies
that the primary key generation mechanism should automatically use the database platform's native id generation strategy
(for example, AUTO INCREMENT in the case of MySql, or Sequences in the case of PostgreSql and Oracle).

Now that we have defined our first entity and its metadata, let's update the database schema:

$ vendor/bin/doctrine orm:schema-tool:update --force --dump-sql

Specifying both flags --force and --dump-sql will cause the DDL statements to be executed and then printed to the screen.

Now, we'll create a new script to insert products into the database:

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<?php
// create_product.php <name>
require_once "bootstrap.php";

$newProductName = $argv[1];

$product = new Product();

$product->setName($newProductName);

$entityManager->persist($product);
$entityManager->flush();

echo "Created Product with ID " . $product->getId() . "\n";

Call this script from the command-line to see how new products are created:

$ php create_product.php ORM

$ php create_product.php DBAL

What is happening here? Using the Product class is pretty standard OOP. The interesting bits are the use of the EntityManager
service. To notify the EntityManager that a new entity should be inserted into the database, you have to call persist(). To
initiate a transaction to actually perform the insertion, you have to explicitly call flush() on the EntityManager.

This distinction between persist and flush is what allows the aggregation of all database writes (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE) into
one single transaction, which is executed when flush() is called. Using this approach, the write-performance is significantly
better than in a scenario in which writes are performed on each entity in isolation.

Next, we'll fetch a list of all the Products in the database. Let's create a new script for this:

<?php
// list_products.php
require_once "bootstrap.php";

$productRepository = $entityManager->getRepository('Product');
$products = $productRepository->findAll();

foreach ($products as $product) {

echo sprintf("-%s\n", $product->getName());
}

The EntityManager#getRepository() method can create a finder object (called a repository) for every type of entity. It is
provided by Doctrine and contains some finder methods like findAll().

Let's continue by creating a script to display the name of a product based on its ID:

<?php
// show_product.php <id>
require_once "bootstrap.php";

$id = $argv[1];
$product = $entityManager->find('Product', $id);

if ($product === null) {

echo "No product found.\n";
exit(1);
}

echo sprintf("-%s\n", $product->getName());

Next we'll update a product's name, given its id. This simple example will help demonstrate Doctrine's implementation of the
UnitOfWork pattern. Doctrine keeps track of all the entities that were retrieved from the Entity Manager, and can detect when
any of those entities' properties have been modified. As a result, rather than needing to call persist($entity) for each
individual entity whose properties were changed, a single call to flush() at the end of a request is sufficient to update the
database for all of the modified entities.

<?php
// update_product.php <id> <new-name>
require_once "bootstrap.php";

$id = $argv[1];
$newName = $argv[2];

$product = $entityManager->find('Product', $id);

if ($product === null) {

echo "Product $id does not exist.\n";
exit(1);
}

$product->setName($newName);
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$entityManager->flush();

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After calling this script on one of the existing products, you can verify the product name changed by calling the
show_product.php script.

Adding Bug and User Entities 

We continue with the bug tracker example by creating the Bug and User classes. We'll store them in src/Bug.php and
src/User.php, respectively.

<?php
// src/Bug.php

use Doctrine\ORM\Annotation as ORM;

/**
* @ORM\Entity(repositoryClass="BugRepository")
* @ORM\Table(name="bugs")
*/
class Bug
{
/**
* @ORM\Id @ORM\Column(type="integer") @ORM\GeneratedValue
* @var int
*/
private $id;

/**
* @ORM\Column(type="string")
* @var string
*/
private $description;

/**
* @ORM\Column(type="datetime")
* @var DateTime
*/
private $created;

/**
* @ORM\Column(type="string")
* @var string
*/
private $status;

public function getId()

{
return $this->id;
}

public function getDescription()

{
return $this->description;
}

public function setDescription($description)

{
$this->description = $description;
}

public function setCreated(DateTime $created)

{
$this->created = $created;
}

public function getCreated()

{
return $this->created;
}

public function setStatus($status)

{
$this->status = $status;
}

public function getStatus()

{
return $this->status;
}
}

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<?php
// src/User.php

use Doctrine\ORM\Annotation as ORM;

/**
* @ORM\Entity
* @ORM\Table(name="users")
*/
class User
{
/**
* @ORM\Id @ORM\GeneratedValue @ORM\Column(type="integer")
* @var int
*/
private $id;

/**
* @ORM\Column(type="string")
* @var string
*/
private $name;

public function getId()

{
return $this->id;
}

public function getName()

{
return $this->name;
}

public function setName($name)

{
$this->name = $name;
}
}

All of the properties we've seen so far are of simple types (integer, string, and datetime). But now, we'll add properties that
will store objects of specific entity types in order to model the relationships between different entities.

At the database level, relationships between entities are represented by foreign keys. But with Doctrine, you'll never have to
(and never should) work with the foreign keys directly. You should only work with objects that represent foreign keys through
their own identities.

For every foreign key you either have a Doctrine ManyToOne or OneToOne association. On the inverse sides of these foreign
keys you can have OneToMany associations. Obviously you can have ManyToMany associations that connect two tables with
each other through a join table with two foreign keys.

Now that you know the basics about references in Doctrine, we can extend the domain model to match the requirements:

<?php
// src/Bug.php
use Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection;

class Bug
{
// ... (previous code)

private $products;

public function __construct()

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

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<?php
// src/User.php
use Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection;

class User
{
// ... (previous code)

private $reportedBugs;
private $assignedBugs;

public function __construct()

{
$this->reportedBugs = new ArrayCollection();
$this->assignedBugs = new ArrayCollection();
}
}

 Whenever an entity is created from the database, a Collection implementation of the type PersistentCollection will
be injected into your entity instead of an ArrayCollection. This helps Doctrine ORM understand the changes that have
happened to the collection that are noteworthy for persistence.

 Lazy load proxies always contain an instance of Doctrine's EntityManager and all its dependencies. Therefore a
var\_dump() will possibly dump a very large recursive structure which is impossible to render and read. You have to use
Doctrine\Common\Util\Debug::dump() to restrict the dumping to a human readable level. Additionally you should be
aware that dumping the EntityManager to a Browser may take several minutes, and the Debug::dump() method just
ignores any occurrences of it in Proxy instances.

Because we only work with collections for the references we must be careful to implement a bidirectional reference in the
domain model. The concept of owning or inverse side of a relation is central to this notion and should always be kept in mind.
The following assumptions are made about relations and have to be followed to be able to work with Doctrine 2. These
assumptions are not unique to Doctrine 2 but are best practices in handling database relations and Object-Relational
Mapping.

In a one-to-one relation, the entity holding the foreign key of the related entity on its own database table is always the
owning side of the relation.
In a many-to-one relation, the Many-side is the owning side by default because it holds the foreign key. Accordingly,
the One-side is the inverse side by default.
In a many-to-one relation, the One-side can only be the owning side if the relation is implemented as a ManyToMany
with a join table, and the One-side is restricted to allow only UNIQUE values per database constraint.
In a many-to-many relation, both sides can be the owning side of the relation. However, in a bi-directional many-to-
many relation, only one side is allowed to be the owning side.
Changes to Collections are saved or updated, when the entity on the owning side of the collection is saved or updated.
Saving an Entity at the inverse side of a relation never triggers a persist operation to changes to the collection.

 Consistency of bi-directional references on the inverse side of a relation have to be managed in userland application
code. Doctrine cannot magically update your collections to be consistent.

In the case of Users and Bugs we have references back and forth to the assigned and reported bugs from a user, making this
relation bi-directional. We have to change the code to ensure consistency of the bi-directional reference:

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<?php
// src/Bug.php
class Bug
{
// ... (previous code)

private $engineer;
private $reporter;

public function setEngineer(User $engineer)

{
$engineer->assignedToBug($this);
$this->engineer = $engineer;
}

public function setReporter(User $reporter)

{
$reporter->addReportedBug($this);
$this->reporter = $reporter;
}

public function getEngineer()

{
return $this->engineer;
}

public function getReporter()

{
return $this->reporter;
}
}

<?php
// src/User.php
class User
{
// ... (previous code)

private $reportedBugs;
private $assignedBugs;

public function addReportedBug(Bug $bug)

{
$this->reportedBugs[] = $bug;
}

public function assignedToBug(Bug $bug)

{
$this->assignedBugs[] = $bug;
}
}

I chose to name the inverse methods in past-tense, which should indicate that the actual assigning has already taken place
and the methods are only used for ensuring consistency of the references. This approach is my personal preference, you can
choose whatever method to make this work.

You can see from User#addReportedBug() and User#assignedToBug() that using this method in userland alone would not add
the Bug to the collection of the owning side in Bug#reporter or Bug#engineer. Using these methods and calling Doctrine for
persistence would not update the Collections' representation in the database.

Only using Bug#setEngineer() or Bug#setReporter() correctly saves the relation information.

The Bug#reporter and Bug#engineer properties are Many-To-One relations, which point to a User. In a normalized relational
model, the foreign key is saved on the Bug's table, hence in our object-relation model the Bug is at the owning side of the
relation. You should always make sure that the use-cases of your domain model should drive which side is an inverse or
owning one in your Doctrine mapping. In our example, whenever a new bug is saved or an engineer is assigned to the bug,
we don't want to update the User to persist the reference, but the Bug. This is the case with the Bug being at the owning side
of the relation.

Bugs reference Products by a uni-directional ManyToMany relation in the database that points from Bugs to Products.

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<?php
// src/Bug.php
class Bug
{
// ... (previous code)

private $products = null;

public function assignToProduct(Product $product)

{
$this->products[] = $product;
}

public function getProducts()

{
return $this->products;
}
}

We are now finished with the domain model given the requirements. Lets add metadata mappings for the Bug entity, as we
did for the Product before:

PHP XML

<?php
// src/Bug.php

use Doctrine\ORM\Annotation as ORM;

/**
* @ORM\Entity
* @ORM\Table(name="bugs")
*/
class Bug
{
/**
* @ORM\Id @ORM\Column(type="integer") @ORM\GeneratedValue
**/
private $id;

/**
* @ORM\Column(type="string")
**/
private $description;

/**
* @ORM\Column(type="datetime")
**/
private $created;

/**
* @ORM\Column(type="string")
**/
private $status;

/**
* @ORM\ManyToOne(targetEntity="User", inversedBy="assignedBugs")
**/
private $engineer;

/**
* @ORM\ManyToOne(targetEntity="User", inversedBy="reportedBugs")
**/
private $reporter;

/**
* @ORM\ManyToMany(targetEntity="Product")
**/
private $products;

// ... (other code)

}

Here we have the entity, id and primitive type definitions. For the "created" field we have used the datetime type, which
translates the YYYY-mm-dd HH:mm:ss database format into a PHP DateTime instance and back.

After the field definitions, the two qualified references to the user entity are defined. They are created by the many-to-one tag.
The class name of the related entity has to be specified with the target-entity attribute, which is enough information for the
database mapper to access the foreign-table. Since reporter and engineer are on the owning side of a bi-directional relation,
we also have to specify the inversed-by attribute. They have to point to the field names on the inverse side of the relationship.
We will see in the next example that the inversed-by attribute has a counterpart mapped-by which makes that the inverse side.

The last definition is for the Bug#products collection. It holds all products where the specific bug occurs. Again you have to
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Finally, we'll add metadata mappings for the User entity.

PHP XML

<?php
// src/User.php

use Doctrine\ORM\Annotation as ORM;

/**
* @ORM\Entity
* @ORM\Table(name="users")
*/
class User
{
/**
* @ORM\Id @ORM\GeneratedValue @ORM\Column(type="integer")
* @var int
**/
private $id;

/**
* @ORM\Column(type="string")
* @var string
**/
private $name;

/**
* @ORM\OneToMany(targetEntity="Bug", mappedBy="reporter")
* @var Bug[] An ArrayCollection of Bug objects.
**/
private $reportedBugs = null;

/**
* @ORM\OneToMany(targetEntity="Bug", mappedBy="engineer")
* @var Bug[] An ArrayCollection of Bug objects.
**/
private $assignedBugs = null;

// .. (other code)
}

Here are some new things to mention about the one-to-many tags. Remember that we discussed about the inverse and
owning side. Now both reportedBugs and assignedBugs are inverse relations, which means the join details have already been
defined on the owning side. Therefore we only have to specify the property on the Bug class that holds the owning sides.

Update your database schema by running:

$ vendor/bin/doctrine orm:schema-tool:update --force

Implementing more Requirements 

So far, we've seen the most basic features of the metadata definition language. To explore additional functionality, let's first
create new User entities:

<?php
// create_user.php
require_once "bootstrap.php";

$newUsername = $argv[1];

$user = new User();

$user->setName($newUsername);

$entityManager->persist($user);
$entityManager->flush();

echo "Created User with ID " . $user->getId() . "\n";

Now call:

$ php create_user.php beberlei

We now have the necessary data to create a new Bug entity:

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<?php
// create_bug.php <reporter-id> <engineer-id> <product-ids>
require_once "bootstrap.php";

$reporterId = $argv[1];
$engineerId = $argv[2];
$productIds = explode(",", $argv[3]);

$reporter = $entityManager->find("User", $reporterId);

$engineer = $entityManager->find("User", $engineerId);
if (!$reporter || !$engineer) {
echo "No reporter and/or engineer found for the given id(s).\n";
exit(1);
}

$bug = new Bug();

$bug->setDescription("Something does not work!");
$bug->setCreated(new DateTime("now"));
$bug->setStatus("OPEN");

foreach ($productIds as $productId) {

$product = $entityManager->find("Product", $productId);
$bug->assignToProduct($product);
}

$bug->setReporter($reporter);
$bug->setEngineer($engineer);

$entityManager->persist($bug);
$entityManager->flush();

echo "Your new Bug Id: ".$bug->getId()."\n";

Since we only have one user and product, probably with the ID of 1, we can call this script as follows:

php create_bug.php 1 1 1

See how simple it is to relate a Bug, Reporter, Engineer and Products? Also recall that thanks to the UnitOfWork pattern,
Doctrine will detect these relations and update all of the modified entities in the database automatically when flush() is
called.

Queries for Application Use-Cases 

List of Bugs 
Using the previous examples we can fill up the database quite a bit. However, we now need to discuss how to query the
underlying mapper for the required view representations. When opening the application, bugs can be paginated through a
list-view, which is the first read-only use-case:

<?php
// list_bugs.php
require_once "bootstrap.php";

$dql = "SELECT b, e, r FROM Bug b JOIN b.engineer e JOIN b.reporter r ORDER BY b.created DESC";

$query = $entityManager->createQuery($dql);
$query->setMaxResults(30);
$bugs = $query->getResult();

foreach ($bugs as $bug) {

echo $bug->getDescription()." - ".$bug->getCreated()->format('d.m.Y')."\n";
echo " Reported by: ".$bug->getReporter()->getName()."\n";
echo " Assigned to: ".$bug->getEngineer()->getName()."\n";
foreach ($bug->getProducts() as $product) {
echo " Platform: ".$product->getName()."\n";
}
echo "\n";
}

The DQL Query in this example fetches the 30 most recent bugs with their respective engineer and reporter in one single SQL
statement. The console output of this script is then:

Something does not work! - 02.04.2010

Reported by: beberlei
Assigned to: beberlei
Platform: My Product

 DQL is not SQL You may wonder why we start writing SQL at the beginning of this use-case. Don't we use an ORM
to get rid of all the endless hand-writing of SQL? Doctrine introduces DQL which is best described as object-query-
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language and is a dialect of OQL and similar to HQL or JPQL. It does not know the concept of columns and tables, but
only those of Entity-Class and property. Using the Metadata we defined before it allows for very short distinctive and

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powerful queries. An important reason why DQL is favourable to the Query API of most ORMs is its similarity to SQL.
The DQL language allows query constructs that most ORMs don't: GROUP BY even with HAVING, Sub-selects, Fetch-
Joins of nested classes, mixed results with entities and scalar data such as COUNT() results and much more. Using DQL
you should seldom come to the point where you want to throw your ORM into the dumpster, because it doesn't
support some the more powerful SQL concepts. Instead of handwriting DQL you can use the QueryBuilder retrieved by
calling $entityManager->createQueryBuilder(). There are more details about this in the relevant part of the
documentation. As a last resort you can still use Native SQL and a description of the result set to retrieve entities from
the database. DQL boils down to a Native SQL statement and a ResultSetMapping instance itself. Using Native SQL you
could even use stored procedures for data retrieval, or make use of advanced non-portable database queries like
PostgreSql's recursive queries.

Array Hydration of the Bug List 

In the previous use-case we retrieved the results as their respective object instances. We are not limited to retrieving objects
only from Doctrine however. For a simple list view like the previous one we only need read access to our entities and can
switch the hydration from objects to simple PHP arrays instead.

Hydration can be an expensive process so only retrieving what you need can yield considerable performance benefits for
read-only requests.

Implementing the same list view as before using array hydration we can rewrite our code:

<?php
// list_bugs_array.php
require_once "bootstrap.php";

$dql = "SELECT b, e, r, p FROM Bug b JOIN b.engineer e ".

"JOIN b.reporter r JOIN b.products p ORDER BY b.created DESC";
$query = $entityManager->createQuery($dql);
$bugs = $query->getArrayResult();

foreach ($bugs as $bug) {

echo $bug['description'] . " - " . $bug['created']->format('d.m.Y')."\n";
echo " Reported by: ".$bug['reporter']['name']."\n";
echo " Assigned to: ".$bug['engineer']['name']."\n";
foreach ($bug['products'] as $product) {
echo " Platform: ".$product['name']."\n";
}
echo "\n";
}

There is one significant difference in the DQL query however, we have to add an additional fetch-join for the products
connected to a bug. The resulting SQL query for this single select statement is pretty large, however still more efficient to
retrieve compared to hydrating objects.

Find by Primary Key 

The next Use-Case is displaying a Bug by primary key. This could be done using DQL as in the previous example with a where
clause, however there is a convenience method on the EntityManager that handles loading by primary key, which we have
already seen in the write scenarios:

<?php
// show_bug.php <id>
require_once "bootstrap.php";

$theBugId = $argv[1];

$bug = $entityManager->find("Bug", (int)$theBugId);

echo "Bug: ".$bug->getDescription()."\n";

echo "Engineer: ".$bug->getEngineer()->getName()."\n";

The output of the engineer’s name is fetched from the database! What is happening?

Since we only retrieved the bug by primary key both the engineer and reporter are not immediately loaded from the database
but are replaced by LazyLoading proxies. These proxies will load behind the scenes, when you attempt to access any of their
un-initialized state.

Sample code of this proxy generated code can be found in the specified Proxy Directory, it looks like:

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<?php
namespace MyProject\Proxies;

class UserProxyHASH extends User implements GhostObjectInterface

{
// ... generated code

public static function staticProxyConstructor($initializer)

{
// ... generated code
}

private function callInitializerHASH($methodName, array $parameters)

{
// ... generated code
}

// ... generated code

}

The call prints:

$ php show_bug.php 1
Bug: Something does not work!
Engineer: beberlei

 Lazy loading additional data can be very convenient but the additional queries create an overhead. If you know that
certain fields will always (or usually) be required by the query then you will get better performance by explicitly
retrieving them all in the first query.

Dashboard of the User 

For the next use-case we want to retrieve the dashboard view, a list of all open bugs the user reported or was assigned to.
This will be achieved using DQL again, this time with some WHERE clauses and usage of bound parameters:

<?php
// dashboard.php <user-id>
require_once "bootstrap.php";

$theUserId = $argv[1];

$dql = "SELECT b, e, r FROM Bug b JOIN b.engineer e JOIN b.reporter r ".

"WHERE b.status = 'OPEN' AND (e.id = ?1 OR r.id = ?1) ORDER BY b.created DESC";

$myBugs = $entityManager->createQuery($dql)
->setParameter(1, $theUserId)
->setMaxResults(15)
->getResult();

echo "You have created or assigned to " . count($myBugs) . " open bugs:\n\n";

foreach ($myBugs as $bug) {

echo $bug->getId() . " - " . $bug->getDescription()."\n";
}

Number of Bugs 
Until now we only retrieved entities or their array representation. Doctrine also supports the retrieval of non-entities through
DQL. These values are called "scalar result values" and may even be aggregate values using COUNT, SUM, MIN, MAX or AVG
functions.

We will need this knowledge to retrieve the number of open bugs grouped by product:

<?php
// products.php
require_once "bootstrap.php";

$dql = "SELECT p.id, p.name, count(b.id) AS openBugs FROM Bug b ".

"JOIN b.products p WHERE b.status = 'OPEN' GROUP BY p.id";
$productBugs = $entityManager->createQuery($dql)->getScalarResult();

foreach ($productBugs as $productBug) {

echo $productBug['name']." has " . $productBug['openBugs'] . " open bugs!\n";
}

Updating Entities 
There is a single use-case missing from the requirements, Engineers should be able to close a bug. This looks like:
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<?php
// src/Bug.php

class Bug
{
public function close()
{
$this->status = "CLOSE";
}
}

<?php
// close_bug.php <bug-id>
require_once "bootstrap.php";

$theBugId = $argv[1];

$bug = $entityManager->find("Bug", (int)$theBugId);

$bug->close();

$entityManager->flush();

When retrieving the Bug from the database it is inserted into the IdentityMap inside the UnitOfWork of Doctrine. This means
your Bug with exactly this id can only exist once during the whole request no matter how often you call EntityManager#find().
It even detects entities that are hydrated using DQL and are already present in the Identity Map.

When flush is called the EntityManager loops over all the entities in the identity map and performs a comparison between the
values originally retrieved from the database and those values the entity currently has. If at least one of these properties is
different the entity is scheduled for an UPDATE against the database. Only the changed columns are updated, which offers a
pretty good performance improvement compared to updating all the properties.

Entity Repositories 
For now we have not discussed how to separate the Doctrine query logic from your model. In Doctrine 1 there was the
concept of Doctrine_Table instances for this separation. The similar concept in Doctrine2 is called Entity Repositories,
integrating the repository pattern at the heart of Doctrine.

Every Entity uses a default repository by default and offers a bunch of convenience methods that you can use to query for
instances of that Entity. Take for example our Product entity. If we wanted to Query by name, we can use:

<?php
$product = $entityManager->getRepository('Product')
->findOneBy(array('name' => $productName));

The method findOneBy() takes an array of fields or association keys and the values to match against.

If you want to find all entities matching a condition you can use findBy(), for example querying for all closed bugs:

<?php
$bugs = $entityManager->getRepository('Bug')
->findBy(array('status' => 'CLOSED'));

foreach ($bugs as $bug) {

// do stuff
}

Compared to DQL these query methods are falling short of functionality very fast. Doctrine offers you a convenient way to
extend the functionalities of the default EntityRepository and put all the specialized DQL query logic on it. For this you have
to create a subclass of Doctrine\ORM\EntityRepository, in our case a BugRepository and group all the previously discussed
query functionality in it:

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<?php
// src/BugRepository.php

use Doctrine\ORM\EntityRepository;

class BugRepository extends EntityRepository

{
public function getRecentBugs($number = 30)
{
$dql = "SELECT b, e, r FROM Bug b JOIN b.engineer e JOIN b.reporter r ORDER BY b.created DESC";

$query = $this->getEntityManager()->createQuery($dql);
$query->setMaxResults($number);
return $query->getResult();
}

public function getRecentBugsArray($number = 30)

{
$dql = "SELECT b, e, r, p FROM Bug b JOIN b.engineer e ".
"JOIN b.reporter r JOIN b.products p ORDER BY b.created DESC";
$query = $this->getEntityManager()->createQuery($dql);
$query->setMaxResults($number);
return $query->getArrayResult();
}

public function getUsersBugs($userId, $number = 15)

{
$dql = "SELECT b, e, r FROM Bug b JOIN b.engineer e JOIN b.reporter r ".
"WHERE b.status = 'OPEN' AND e.id = ?1 OR r.id = ?1 ORDER BY b.created DESC";

return $this->getEntityManager()->createQuery($dql)
->setParameter(1, $userId)
->setMaxResults($number)
->getResult();
}

public function getOpenBugsByProduct()

{
$dql = "SELECT p.id, p.name, count(b.id) AS openBugs FROM Bug b ".
"JOIN b.products p WHERE b.status = 'OPEN' GROUP BY p.id";
return $this->getEntityManager()->createQuery($dql)->getScalarResult();
}
}

To be able to use this query logic through $this->getEntityManager()->getRepository('Bug') we have to adjust the metadata
slightly.

PHP XML

<?php

use Doctrine\ORM\Annotation as ORM;

/**
* @ORM\Entity(repositoryClass="BugRepository")
* @ORM\Table(name="bugs")
**/
class Bug
{
//...
}

Now we can remove our query logic in all the places and instead use them through the EntityRepository. As an example here
is the code of the first use case "List of Bugs":

<?php
// list_bugs_repository.php
require_once "bootstrap.php";

$bugs = $entityManager->getRepository('Bug')->getRecentBugs();

foreach ($bugs as $bug) {

echo $bug->getDescription()." - ".$bug->getCreated()->format('d.m.Y')."\n";
echo " Reported by: ".$bug->getReporter()->getName()."\n";
echo " Assigned to: ".$bug->getEngineer()->getName()."\n";
foreach ($bug->getProducts() as $product) {
echo " Platform: ".$product->getName()."\n";
}
echo "\n";
}

Using EntityRepositories you can avoid coupling your model with specific query logic. You can also re-use query logic easily
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The method count() takes an array of fields or association keys and the values to match against. This provides you with a
convenient and lightweight way to count a resultset when you don't need to deal with it:

<?php
$productCount = $entityManager->getRepository(Product::class)
->count(['name' => $productName]);

Conclusion 
This tutorial is over here, I hope you had fun. Additional content will be added to this tutorial incrementally, topics will include:

More on Association Mappings

Lifecycle Events triggered in the UnitOfWork
Ordering of Collections

Additional details on all the topics discussed here can be found in the respective manual chapters.

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