Inserting Data via Fixtures

We have our database table, but now we need some data! When working in your development environment, it's useful to have a set of fake data to seed you database: stuff you can play around with while building. We call this data fixtures.

In our case, it would be great to pre-fill our table with some Starships! Doctrine even has a package adding this fake fixtures data! At your terminal, run:

composer require --dev orm-fixtures

We used --dev because we only need fixtures in our development environment. Scroll up to see what was installed: doctrine/data-fixtures and doctrine-fixtures-bundle. Run

git status

to see what the recipes added. Standard Flex stuff, added a bundle, but also this src/DataFixtures directory. Let's check that out: open src/DataFixtures/AppFixtures.php. This load() method is where we can create our fixtures. Delete what's there so we can start fresh.

To add entities to the database no matter where you are, it's refreshingly simple! First, create the object like normal: $ship1 = new Starship() - the one from App\Entity.

In a previous episode, we created this StarshipRepository service in src/Model/. Open that up. We have a findAll() method that creates these Starship objects on the fly. We'll use this data for our fixtures!

Copy the second argument of the first Starship - that's the name. Back in AppFixtures, call $ship1->setName('USS LeafyCruiser (NCC-0001)'). Do the same for $class: $ship1->setClass('Garden'), $captain: $ship1->setCaptain('John Luke Pickles'), $status: $ship1->setStatus(StarshipStatusEnum::IN_PROGRESS) and don't forget to import the enum. Finally, $arrivedAt: $ship1->setArrivedAt(new \DateTimeImmutable('-1 day')).

For the other two ships, I'll copy and paste some code from the tutorial/ directory.

We now have three ship objects, but nothing has been saved - or persisted to the database yet. But interesting, Doctrine passes us an ObjectManager. This is the heart of Doctrine. We'll use it to save, fetch, update, and delete objects, our entities, from the database. What an overachiever!

To use it, after we've created our ship objects, write $manager->persist($ship1), $manager->persist($ship2), and $manager->persist($ship3). But persist() doesn't actually insert them yet: it just queues them to be saved.

To execute some INSERT queries and get these ships docked, write $manager->flush(). flush() is really cool: it looks at all the objects that are queued to be persisted and writes them to the database with an efficient SQL query. In this case, it will insert all three Starships in one query. Super cool!

Fixtures done! How do we execute this code? Run:

symfony console doctrine:fixtures:load

It's double-checking that we really want to load our fixtures because it will also erase all existing data. Choose yes and... Success?

Run that raw SQL query again:

symfony console doctrine:query:sql 'SELECT * FROM starship'

We have ships! Awesome!

Phew, we now have a database with data! Next, we'll refactor our app's controllers to pull Starships from our database and show them on the page. This will be much easier than you might imagine!