Update Query & Rich vs Anemic Models

Hey Rob T.!

That's a really good question... and kind of tough to answer - it's a judgement call. But, at least in our company, we tend to put logic into a service more often than we tweak the entity. We would usually change the entity when we have some pure method whose only job is to manipulate the data on that entity (e.g. upVote() or getFullName() which concatenates first and last name). Normally it's kind of hard (at least in my experience) to put too much logic into you entity because your entity does not have access to any services.

For example, suppose that each time a Question gets an up vote, you need to send an email to someone. That logic cannot go into the entity... because the entity doesn't have access to the mailer service. You could pass it into a method - e.g. public function upVote(MailerInterface $mailer) then pass the mailer in whenever you call that. DON'T do that :). You probably already know, but services should never go into your entities.

Anyways, if you don't pass services into your entity, then your entity is pretty limited. In the above example, I would need to have some sort of QuestionVoteHelper with an upVote(Question $question) method. That method would be responsible for incrementing the vote on the Question object AND sending the email. You could still choose to have an upVote() method on your entity. The QuestionVoteHelper would call it... and its job would simply be to increment the vote count (the helper service would still send the email).

That answer got... lengthy 😆. Let me know if it helped!

Cheers!

Hi Ryan,

Why is it considered bad practice to add services to entities? Is it because methods of an entity should strictly be used/created to modify its own data and nothing more?

Hey Ccc123,

Yes, using services inside entities is a bad practice. And yes, that's because entities are just simple data objects.

If you need to do some heavy calculations inside and its logic is moved to a separate service - rewrite that service so that you pass the entity object to the service and it do all the necessary heavy calculation and set the final simple value on that entity instead of passing the service to the entity.

Cheers!

You say don't pass service vars into the entity, but thats exactly what some past devs had done to the code base I mentioned... *shudders*!!!

That's brilliant, thanks very much for taking the time to reply. Makes a lot of sense and has definitely helped :)

Ha! I was afraid of that! 😆I've seen it too

Anyways, I'm glad this was helpful!

Cheers!

Hey @Diarill

I suppose you can have multiple databases using Docker. I unknown the details of how to properly do it but in this link explains how to set up multiple databases in the traditional way. I suppose you can start that way, and then try to replace the local databases with Docker. I think it's a matter of setting up the env vars properly
https://symfony.com/doc/current/doctrine/multiple_entity_managers.html

Cheers!

Hey Niclas H.!

Ah, good catch! Yes, we'll add a note to the video to help - thanks!

Cheers!

Hey Nayte,

Yes, you'er right, the flush() will send the query to your DB only when the object is changed - that part is completely handled by Doctrine ORM, Doctrine track all the entities and if any have changes - the corresponding queries will be sent on flush() and only on flush() :)

And yes, it consumes some resources for this, but that's the price of this developer experience you have with Doctrine ORM. And it's not that much resources when you do thing right, so don't think too much about this. But if you're really curious, you can always use a profiler tool like Blackfire.io (we even have a course about it here: https://symfonycasts.com/sc... ) and check how heavy that part of code is in your application ;)

Cheers!

Hey Farry7,

Yeah, you can orginize it as you want. Good idea about orginizing controllers, if you have several controllers related to "Games" - it makes sense to put them into src/Controller/Games/ folder. And same for other services, you may group them with separate folders.

About entities, take a look at "config/packages/doctrine.yaml" config file, in particular, "doctrine.orm.mappings". In theory you can put your entities in different folders, but you would need to configure paths to them.

About repositories - you don't care about them, you can put them in whatever folder you want too, but you will need to specify correct FQCNs in your entities.

I hope this helps!

Cheers!