Symfony 3: Doctrine & the Database

Hey Paweł C.!

If you need to write raw SQL, I always say, just do it instead of using the Query Builder :). But yea, you have the special problem where the EntityType is *forcing* you to use the QueryBuilder. So, your best option is to

instead of specifying the query_builder option, just query for the entities that you need with your custom query and pass them directly to the choices option: https://symfony.com/doc/cur.... You'll need to dependency inject the entity manager or your repository into your form class to make this query. Also, the tricky part is that, Symfony *does* need the entity objects in order for the EntityType to work. So, you'll need to write your custom query to only select the id field, then make another, normal query where you return all of the actual entity objects that match that array of ids.

If you really want to completely avoid querying for entities, then don't use the EntityType, just use the ChoiceType. But then, you'll need to use a data transformer to ultimately transform the submitted value back into an entity - https://symfony.com/doc/cur.... So.... using EntityType is easier :).

Cheers!

Thank You!

Hey Lijana Z.

You can run your commands passing in -vvv flag to see the exact queries being executed. Give it a try and let me know if it worked

Cheers!

It shows sql queryies but with ? marks and array of parameters after them. I need those ? marks replaced with parameters. I found in stackoverflow one asnwer how to do that but it did not worked with date strings when they were parameters, but I have made a fix, did not test much, but maybe it will work. Then will need to find more convenient way to access it from anywhere.

Hmm, yeah, I think Doctrine can't do much more for you but you may want to enable MySql logging then. It's not recommended, it may slow down your app but I believe you will use it only for developing
https://stackoverflow.com/a...

Cheers!

Hey Igor!

This is the 2nd episode in the Symfony 3 series after knpuniversity.com/screencas..., which we're just finishing now. My hope is to get this episode this month. In the mean time, Doctrine hasn't changed that much, so here are some links that might be useful:

* https://knpuniversity.com/s... (and the chapter after)
* https://knpuniversity.com/s...
* and most of https://knpuniversity.com/s...

I hope that helps!

Hey Shairyar!

Hmm, I'm not sure. But! To find out, here's what I would do. Suppose that the persisted property on College for the image is called imagePath. First, I'd see if anything in College modifies the imagePath property other than setImagePath(). If anything else *does* modify imagePath, then temporarily comment that out and edit the College - see if the image is lost. Also, throw a new \Exception() in setImagePath() to see if something is calling it on College edit.

My guess is that you might be setting $this->imagePath = null; inside setLogo() or something similar, but I'm not sure :).

Cheers!

Hi,

All i had to do was move '$currentProfileImage = $college->getLogo();' at the beginning of the action and it worked :)

Thanks for your comments and looking into it anyways.

Baig

Hi Andrés!

Hmm, that usually means that you are trying to persist and entity (e.g. Genus) - but Doctrine does not think it's an entity. For example, if you mistakenly put `Genus` in a directory called `Model` instead of `Entity`, then Doctrine wouldn't know to read its annotation metadata, and it would look like a normal class, not an entity. This would cause this error. It's a very uncommon error, exception in edge-cases when you're working with third-party libraries that give you entities. In those cases, sometimes you have to add configuration so Doctrine is aware of the extra entity classes :).

I hope that helps!

Hey Sudhir! I'm still aiming for the next few weeks :)

ok my bad, found the issue, was on the indexes, as im using isRead variable, but the table name is in fact "is_read"

Awesome :) - glad you got it figured out. It's configurable, but out-of-the box with Doctrine in Symfony, property names are "snaked-cased" like this, which I kinda like (but it can surprise at first!)

Cheers @JLChafardet!

@weaverryan my subscription expired, but ill renew it next month, this month im tied down horribly with a laravel project that i gota take care of. (:S didnt want to write in laravel, but the customer's mind is dead set on it, wanted to try to get them to use symfony)

Hey! No worries :) Laravel is not my preference, but it's nice too - you can probably bring back some nice tools/lessons from it back to Symfony.

I look forward to having you back! - I noticed you hadn't commented in awhile ;)

@weaverryan yeah! suddenly i became swamped in work, a company in the netherlands hired some hours (i work as a freelance contractor some hours a week aside from my business, you know, extra coins wont hurt ever, as long as they dont take up sleep time nor weekends [I myself used to work even weekends for the past 18 years, lost a lot of time on that, so now im properly taking care of not just my mental health but also my body's health and my spiritual peace haha]) so got 2 projects going on my 8h/day mon-fri work routine, 3 extra hours a day contracted in the NL for this laravel project, havent had much time to browse or comment! but I take to heart everything I learnt here! I'm still much inexperienced, but im growing with each line of code i write, getting to know symfony better bit by bit.

regarding laravel, well its indeed nice, it has a lot of out of the box features that are really cool, yet it feels way too much microframeworkish, thats just overgrown, it doesnt feel by any means a fully featured framework in and on itself, but as stated a "overgrown" microframework. I may be wrong tho.

Hi there!
I'm having the same problem:
My class:

/**
 * Course
 *
 * @ORM\Table(
 *     name="course",
 *     uniqueConstraints={
 *          @ORM\UniqueConstraint(name="unique_course", columns={"name", "institution_id", "user_id"})
 *      },
 *     indexes={
 *          @ORM\Index(name="IDX_169E6FB9A76ED395", columns={"user_id"})
 *      }
 * )
 * @ORM\Entity(repositoryClass="MainBundle\Entity\CourseRepository")
 * @UniqueEntity(
 *      fields={"name", "institution", "user"},
 *      errorPath="name",
 *      message="unique.course.name"
 * )
 * @ORM\HasLifecycleCallbacks
 */
class Course extends AbstractEntity
     /**
     * @var \MainBundle\Entity\User
     *
     * @ORM\Column(name="user_id")
     * @ORM\ManyToOne(targetEntity="MainBundle\Entity\User", inversedBy="series")
     * @ORM\JoinColumn(name="user_id", referencedColumnName="id")
     */
    private $user;

Then when I run:

console doctrine:migrations:diff                                                         
  [Doctrine\DBAL\Schema\SchemaException]                  
  There is no column with name 'user' on table 'course'. 

Hey Marcelo,

Could you debug it by running bin/console doctrine:schema:validate command? And let me know its result. It shows whether you have any invalid mapping.

BTW, you probably use user column name instead of user_id in some of your indexes or uniqueConstraints. Please, recheck that all your entities (not only Course entity) have user_id column name instead of user inside @ORM\Table() annotation. Actually, you have to check all the entities which have relation to the User entity.

Cheers!

Hey there!

Welcome! Yes, it's not exactly a beginner problem, but maybe I can help:

1) The only thing that will live in your repository are queries. From flat PHP, think of it this way: any time that you *used* to literally write a query - e.g. $sql = 'SELECT * FROM ...', followed by $conn->execute($sql) or something similar - put that logic as a new method in a repository. That's the only purpose of a repository: to try to prevent query logic from being all around your project. If you're selecting from multiple tables, just put the new method in the repository that you feel most appropriately fits.

2) Depending on your user flow, your form might be quite complicated for this. If the user is creating an event, then adding a drop-down of all of the themes in the system is simple - just use the EntityType. But, if you need to do some crazy AJAX logic once the user selects the theme (e.g. in order to load a list of products in that theme, or something) - that can get more complicated. My advice on the form system is always this: use it when it works for you. But if you get in a real complex situation, it's ok to revert back and use some normal HTML forms and process the input manually in your controller (a bit more like flat PHP)

3) If you need to do some validation after a form is submitted to see if the required products are available, then you can do that in your controller (and just render the template with an error message if there is a problem). If you want to get a bit more advanced, you can create a custom validation constraint. I talk about some of the possibilities on this post: https://knpuniversity.com/s...

Overall, don't worry too much. Symfony gives you a lot of tools, but optional tools. If you feel overwhelmed, it's ok to choose to use less of Symfony's tools, while you get going :).

Good luck!

ok I've been playing with the gedmo/doctrine-extensions, seems i've gotten most of it to work, except translatable, or at least im not seeing it create any tables for the translations, loggable, softdeletable, timestampable, sluggable tho seems to work just fine.

gota keep playing with it it seems.

dogtrine's learning curve is really step! oh well, who doesnt love a good challenge eh!

Yo @JLChafardet!

You beat me to it - but I was going to recommend gedmo - so very happy you found it. It's a great library, though sometimes its documentation isn't AS great as it could be :). Are you using it with StofDoctrineExtensionBundle? It doesn't do much, but if helps alleviate some of the setup work (but it's docs aren't great). I'm not sure about Translatable - that's one I haven't used yet.

But yea, the extensions are super fun - it might be good for a mini-tutorial :)

Cheers!

Heya @weaverryan !

Tried alone first, pure doctrine extensions, installation was a bit rough, but went ok! tho couldnt get translatable to work, then went with StofDE and got it working, believe it or not, was touger to get StofDE working tho.

just find really irritating it seems translatable uses a single table to translate everything, will have to see that a little bit ahead! i will port some apps from silex to s3, but on my free time, for now gota keep up working on what gota be done hehe

Nice work @JLChafardet

I think what happens in a lot of cases with Doctrine is that:

A) it requires more typing to set something up and
B) The documentation often isn't clear (so that it's difficult to know what to type!)

Anyways - nice job, and thanks for sharing your thoughts - I definitely have this on the "idea" list :)

Cheers!

i seem to be advancing on the translations, ill keep you posted lol

translatable and versionable (loggable) dont seem to be friendly. adding a new translation is interpreted by loggable as a new version of the row.

Those two behaviors specifically will be very difficult to get working together. And it kind of makes sense - versioning is already hard in a relational database (you need to duplicate each row before it's changed). Add onto that the fact that each row now has many translations, and you quickly (and correctly) get a big, ugly matrix. I use some of the more magic behaviors sparingly - learning from Doctrine version 1 that the magic has costs. For example, on our apps, we don't use Loggable/versionable or soft deletable.

So, my best advice is to consider doing *less* - these behaviors try to make a relational database do things that it doesn't naturally do well. If you layer on too many, I don't think you'll be happy.

Cheers!

Consider this tho: this works flawlessly in propel! (just for argument sake, if it works in propel, out of the box, no extra bundle required, i think it would be great for doctrine to have it too).
back on topic:
yeah i think ill get rid of loggable/versionable behavior. as the translatable one is more important for the customer, offering "versions" was an idea of mine and i actually never really offered it, i just "wanted" to give it as an extra

i was pointed at https://github.com/DATA-DOG... seems its a more robust audit tool, which could serve, ill consider it for later implementation to see if it works in my favor

ok, getting on my way to properly have Versioned and Translatable working together! what a freaking long day.

the issue seems to be related to the fact that to add a new language you have to actually "edit" and when you "edit" it generates a new version.

its pissing me off badly.

seems is not possible to use them together. i hate this, i really dont want to implement my own behaviors.

I think it would do great to have a full blown tutorial/track coverage.

I've been playing with the Versioned and Translatable behaviors, and at least in 5 hours of work, i CANNOT get them to work properly.

heres the basic main reason why now that I see how Dogtrine works why some people prefer to use Propel.

I'm going to keep at it, as i just cant accept defeat, but this is just ridiculously complex for something that should be ridiculously simple.

getting "Versioned" fields doesnt seem to work on the fly as it should, what i mean is this:
Entity:

    namespace AppBundle\Entity;

    use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;
    use Gedmo\Mapping\Annotation as Gedmo;
    use Gedmo\Translatable\Translatable;

    /**
    * @ORM\Entity
    * @Gedmo\Loggable()
    * @Gedmo\SoftDeleteable(fieldName="deletedAt", timeAware=false)
    * @ORM\Table(name="blog", indexes={@ORM\Index(name="title_idx", columns={"title"}),@ORM\Index(name="slug_idx", columns={"slug"})})
    */
    class Blog implements Translatable
    {
        /**
        * @ORM\Id
        * @ORM\GeneratedValue(strategy="AUTO")
        * @ORM\Column(type="integer", unique=true)
        */
        private $id;

        /**
        * @Gedmo\Translatable()
        * @Gedmo\Versioned()
        * @ORM\Column(type="string")
        */
        private $title;

        /**
        * @Gedmo\Timestampable(on="create")
        * @ORM\Column(type="datetime")
        */
        private $createdAt;

        /**
        * @Gedmo\Timestampable(on="update")
        * @ORM\Column(type="datetime", nullable=true)
        */
        private $updatedAt;

        /**
        * @ORM\Column(type="datetime", nullable=true)
        */
        private $deletedAt;

        public function getId()
        {
            return $this->id;
        }

        public function getTitle()
        {
            return $this->title;
        }

        public function setTitle($title)
        {
            $this->title = $title;
            return $this;
        }

    }
    ?>

Controller:

namespace AppBundle\Controller;

use AppBundle\Entity\Blog;
use Sensio\Bundle\FrameworkExtraBundle\Configuration\Route;
use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Controller\Controller;

class BlogController extends Controller
{
    /**
     * @Route("/test")
     */
    public function newAction()
    {
        //we insert
        $blog = new Blog();
        $blog->setTitle('Titulo 1 ');
        $blog->setDescription('Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.');
        $blog->setMainImage('image');
        $blog->setContent("<p>Praesent eleifend facilisis sapien a lobortis. Aliquam semper feugiat lectus. Cras non ligula nec odio gravida maximus sed eu sem. Quisque in ornare sem odio</p>");
        $blog->setTranslatableLocale('es_ES');
        $em = $this->getDoctrine()->getManager();
        $em->persist($blog);
        $em->flush();

        //we retrieve (comment the above code and run the code below this line)
        $em = $this->getDoctrine()->getManager();
        $blogEm = $this->getDoctrine()
            ->getRepository('AppBundle:Blog');
        $articles = $blogEm->findAll();

        dump($articles);
        //IT DOESNT get any of the Versioned fields.

the answer from the dump is:

BlogController.php on line 36:
array:1 [▼
  0 => Blog {#565 ▼
    -id: 1
    -title: ""
    -slug: "article-one-1"
    -mainImage: "image"
    -description: ""
    -content: ""
    -isVisible: false
    -locale: null
    -createdAt: DateTime {#561 ▼
      +"date": "2016-06-27 15:45:36.000000"
      +"timezone_type": 3
      +"timezone": "America/Caracas"
    }
    -updatedAt: DateTime {#562 ▼
      +"date": "2016-06-27 15:45:36.000000"
      +"timezone_type": 3
      +"timezone": "America/Caracas"
    }
    -deletedAt: null
  }
]

Yep, I am aware of this - it's tricky because if you *do* include the unfolded code blocks, then some of them are HUGE (in some tutorials, we show a cached file that is a few thousand lines long) and you also lose perspective of the 5 lines that we want you to focus on. But, if they're folded, then sometimes you can't see enough :). I don't think there's a perfect way - except to check out the code on the site ;)

Cheers!

I already know that I can use EntityType, I'm confused how pass to next part of form variable.
For example 1st is id of BMD category, so next part of form need to have only BMW matches and so on

BMD = BMW ; -)

Hey Peter!

Let me see if I understood you well. What you need is like a three steps form, where you have to choose an option first, so next form (step) gets filled up based on the chosen option (because they are related), and for step three is the same formula. Am I correct?

Cheers!

Hi, Yes Diego that is correct.

Great!
For that case I would do it with JS, because you need to generate your forms dynamically. You gonna need an extra endpoint (backend) where you can pass the options selected by user, and then return a rendered form as the response of the AJAX call (I'm assuming you are familiar making AJAX calls, if not, you can watch our JS tutorials, they are awesome!)

Cheers!

Thank you for response.

Let me explain, I would like first - to prepare my spider of manufacturers, then add categories to them, and then - types, or models to categories.

I'm (mostly) not shure how to handle doctrine to write those three entities in the same time. - I have already made the may-to-one relations from last category entity to manufacturer, gave fields passing right Object to 'set' methods in entities

I sow in this tutorial on #3 or #4 episode smth that can help me:

$em->persist($ob1),
$em->persist($ob2)

but how handle the form if I want set only manufacturer? - is it possible?, or better way is just make special form for manufacturer?.

Ajax in symfony is a little bizzare for me...

You may need to create a model class that maps all the fields you need for this form, then create a FormType based on that class, it can contain embedded forms of your entities so you don't repeat yourself.
You can watch an example of creating an embedded form here: https://knpuniversity.com/s...
or in the symfony docs: https://symfony.com/doc/cur...