Email Context & the Magic "email" Variable

Yo Brandon!

Ah yes! So basically, $order->getOrdersTo() gives you an array (well, it's a PersistentCollection, which is an object, but acts like an array) of your related object (e.g. Email - I'm not sure what your's is really called). You need to "convert" these into Address objects. The simplest algorithm would be:

$addresses = [];
foreach ($orders->getOrdersTo() as $orderTo) {
    // I'm guessing the entity has a getEmail() method on it
    $addresses[] = new Address($orderTo->getEmail());
}

// ...
->to($addresses)

You can also get fancier and use $addresses = $orders->getOrdersTo()->map(function($orderTo) { return new Address($orderTo->getEmail()) }... but that's up to you - that's a fancier syntax for the same thing. You could also add a helper method to your Order entity - e.g. $order->getOrdersToAddresses() and you would put the converting code inside of that.

Let me know if that helps!

Cheers!

Ryan,
With your first suggestion I now get the error "An address can be an instance of Address or a string ("array") given)"
Which confuses me because I thought in the foreach loop they were being converted to an instance of Address. Did I miss something?

The fancier way I like, and I haven't seen it before but I get the error
An address can be an instance of Address or a string ("Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection") given).
In my orders class I do have in a construct
$this->orderstoo = new ArrayCollection();
I didn't add that but Symfony must have when I made the entity from the command line. Any thoughts?

Yo Brandon !

Bah, I was sloppy - my fault! The ->to() method on the Email object does (of course) accept an Address object, but it does not support an array of Address objects, which is what we created. We can simplify:

foreach ($orders->getOrdersTo() as $orderTo) {
    // I'm guessing the entity has a getEmail() method on it
    $email->addTo(new Address($orderTo->getEmail()));
}

No need to create an array at all :). If you DO want to use the fancier way, here's how. Two things to know:

1) The addTo() and to() methods actually allow for an unlimited number of arguments. So technically, you could say ->to(new Address(...), new Address(...), new Address(...)) - this is called a variadic argument.

2) The problem with my original comment (and what caused the "Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection given" error) was that I forgot that when you call ->map on a Doctrine collection, it returns another Doctrine collection (ArrayCollection specifically), not a normal PHP array.

If you put these facts together, you can find a solution like this:

$addresses = $orders->getOrdersTo()->map(function($orderTo) { return new Address($orderTo->getEmail()) };

$email->to(... $addresses);

The ... syntax "expands" the addresses ArrayCollection (this works also with normal arrays) so that it is equivalent to writing ->to(new Address(...), new Address(...), new Address(...)).

Let me know if that works!

Cheers!

Ryan, Thing of beauty, works perfect, thank you so much!

Hey Med

You are totally right! And of course we have a note about it in the script code, and it's mentioned in video!

Cheers!

Hey mr_d,

Thanks for the feedback! Video should be already fixed, it should be HD now! And we'll check out README file, this course is based on Upload course, so probably that's the reason!

Cheers!