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01.

Adding a Comment Entity

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Hey friends! I mean, hello fellow space-traveling developer... friends. Welcome, to part two of our Doctrine tutorial where we talk all about... relationships. Oh, I love relationships, and there are so many beautiful types in the universe! Like, the relationship between two old friends, as they high-five after a grueling trip between solar systems. Or, the complex relationship between a planet and a moon: a perfect gravitational dance between BFF's. And of course, the most incredible type of relationship in all of the galaxy... database relationships.

Sure, we learned a ton about Doctrine in the first tutorial, but we completely avoided this topic! And it turns out, database relationships are pretty darn important if you want to build one of those "real" applications. So let's crush them.

Project Setup

As always, to have the best possible relationship with Doctrine, you should totally code along with me. Download the course code from this page. After you unzip the file, you'll find a start/ directory that will have the same code you see here. Check out the README.md file for setup instructions, and the answer to this KnpU space riddle:

My name sounds white & fluffy, but I'm not! And instead of blocking the sun, I orbit it.

Need to know the answer? Then download the course code! Anyways, the last setup step will be to open a terminal, move into the project directory and run:

php bin/console server:run

to start the built-in web server. Then, celebrate by finding your browser, and loading http://localhost:8000. Hello: The Space Bar! Our hot new app that helps spread real news to curious astronauts across the galaxy.

And thanks to the last tutorial, these articles are being loaded dynamically from the database. But... these comments at the bottom? Yea, those are still hardcoded. We need to fix that! And this will be our first relationship: each Article can have many Comments. But, more about that later.

Creating the Comment Entity

In the src/Entity directory, the only entity we have so far is Article:

159 lines | src/Entity/Article.php
// ... lines 1 - 8
/**
* @ORM\Entity(repositoryClass="App\Repository\ArticleRepository")
*/
class Article
{
// ... lines 14 - 157
}

So before we can talk about relationships, we first need to build a Comment entity. We could create this by hand, but the generator is so much nicer:

Open a new terminal tab and run:

php bin/console make:entity

Name the entity Comment. Then, for the fields, we need one for the author and one for the actual comment. Add authorName as a string field. And yea, someday, we might have a User table. And then, this could be a relationship to that table. But for now, keep it as a simple string.

Next, add content as a text field, and also say no to nullable. Hit enter one more time to finish up.

Oh, but before we generate the migration, go open the new Comment class:

58 lines | src/Entity/Comment.php
// ... lines 1 - 2
namespace App\Entity;
use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;
/**
* @ORM\Entity(repositoryClass="App\Repository\CommentRepository")
*/
class Comment
{
/**
* @ORM\Id()
* @ORM\GeneratedValue()
* @ORM\Column(type="integer")
*/
private $id;
/**
* @ORM\Column(type="string", length=255)
*/
private $authorName;
/**
* @ORM\Column(type="text")
*/
private $content;
public function getId()
{
return $this->id;
}
public function getAuthorName(): ?string
{
return $this->authorName;
}
public function setAuthorName(string $authorName): self
{
$this->authorName = $authorName;
return $this;
}
public function getContent(): ?string
{
return $this->content;
}
public function setContent(string $content): self
{
$this->content = $content;
return $this;
}
}

No surprises: id, authorName, content and some getter & setter methods. At the top of the class, let's add use TimestampableEntity:

61 lines | src/Entity/Comment.php
// ... lines 1 - 5
use Gedmo\Timestampable\Traits\TimestampableEntity;
/**
* @ORM\Entity(repositoryClass="App\Repository\CommentRepository")
*/
class Comment
{
use TimestampableEntity;
// ... lines 14 - 59
}

That will give us $createdAt and $updatedAt fields.

Now head back to your terminal and run:

php bin/console make:migration

When that finishes, go find the new file. We just want to make sure that this doesn't contain any surprises. For example, if you're working on multiple branches, then your database may be out-of-sync before you run make:migration. If that happens, the migration file would contain extra changes that you'll want to remove. In this case, it looks great:

29 lines | src/Migrations/Version20180426184910.php
// ... lines 1 - 2
namespace DoctrineMigrations;
use Doctrine\DBAL\Migrations\AbstractMigration;
use Doctrine\DBAL\Schema\Schema;
/**
* Auto-generated Migration: Please modify to your needs!
*/
class Version20180426184910 extends AbstractMigration
{
public function up(Schema $schema)
{
// this up() migration is auto-generated, please modify it to your needs
$this->abortIf($this->connection->getDatabasePlatform()->getName() !== 'mysql', 'Migration can only be executed safely on \'mysql\'.');
$this->addSql('CREATE TABLE comment (id INT AUTO_INCREMENT NOT NULL, author_name VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL, content LONGTEXT NOT NULL, created_at DATETIME NOT NULL, updated_at DATETIME NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY(id)) DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci ENGINE = InnoDB');
}
public function down(Schema $schema)
{
// this down() migration is auto-generated, please modify it to your needs
$this->abortIf($this->connection->getDatabasePlatform()->getName() !== 'mysql', 'Migration can only be executed safely on \'mysql\'.');
$this->addSql('DROP TABLE comment');
}
}

Go back to your terminal and, migrate!

php bin/console doctrine:migrations:migrate

Perfect! We have an article table and now a comment table. But, they are not friends yet. Time to add a relation!