Add Droid

Coming soon...

StarshipDroid: Your Ticket to Interstellar Travel

Now, you might be thinking: "Hold up, do I really need to create a StarshipDroid object every time I want a droid to hop aboard a starship?" Well, sure. It's a bit more elbow grease, but it's also as clear as a summer's day on Tatooine. But hey, let's kick things up a notch, shall we? How about we get the starship->add(), ship->addDroid() method back in the game?

That's right. I'm talking about tossing out the old, and getting back to using ship->addDroid(droid) just like the good ol' days. Now, this might not work right off the bat, but let's give it a shot. Load up the fixtures. Ouch! We're hit with an 'Undefined property: App\Entity\Starship::$droids' straight from Starship. Not exactly a surprise, considering we called upon the long-gone droids property in addDroid().

Refactoring: It's Like Spring Cleaning, But for Code

So, what now? It's refactoring time! The first thing on our list is to check if our Starship already has a ticket for the droid in question. To make this happen, we need to switch the property to use the getDroids() method. But wait, $this->getDroids()->add() isn't going to cut it. Instead, we're going to roll up our sleeves and create the join entity right here.

StarshipDroid = new StarshipDroid();
StarshipDroid->setDroid(droid); StarshipDroid->setStarship(this);

Now we need to get our starships and StarshipDroid on board this object. So, $this->starshipDroids->add(starshipDroid), because this is the captain of the ship, the owning side of the relationship. We need to make sure that this is set. Let's give the fixtures another whirl.

The Doctrine of Errors

Ah ha, a new error. This one's a frequent flyer in Doctrine: 'A new entity was found through the relationship App\Entity\Starship#starshipDroids that was not configured to cascade persist for the entity StarshipDroid'. This is just a fancy way of saying we've created a new StarshipDroid object and told Doctrine to keep this Starship in its records. But we forgot to mention the StarshipDroid.

Here's the rub: we don't have access to the entity manager. So we can't just tell it entityManager->persist(starshipDroid). Instead, we're going to lean on something called cascade={"persist"}, which I'll dive into in just a moment. Hang tight, we're about to make the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs!