Droid Entity

Coming soon...

A Symphony of Relationships

Well, you've had a bit of a taste of relationship types by now. You've been formally introduced to ManyToOne and OneToMany — it's like they are two sides of the same coin. So, in reality, you've been dealing with just one type of relationship so far.

And that OneToOne relationship you've heard about? Well, it's just a ManyToOne relationship playing dress up, restricting a Starship part so that it can only have a monogamous relationship with one Starship. So, ManyToOne, OneToMany, OneToOne — they're all partying together in the same type of relationship club. But hey, variety is the spice of life, right?

Enter the Droids

Let's bring in some drama. Picture this: space repair. It's a high-stakes, dangerous job. That pesky vacuum of space is always out to get us humans, so who better to tackle it than our trusty droids?

You command an army of droids, each assigned to multiple starships and vice versa. This is where our second and final relationship type, ManyToMany, takes the spotlight.

Let's set the stage by creating a droid entity. Pop this command in your console:

symfony console make:entity Droid

And just like that, you're in business. Now we need a couple of properties: name and primaryFunction. The defaults will do just fine. That's it, easy peasy.

But remember, a developer's work is never done. After you've made your changes, it's migration time — and not the bird kind. Copy the following command, because we're developers, and developers are efficient (not lazy!):

symfony console doctrine:migrations:migrate

Voilà! You've got a shiny new droid table in your database. It's not yet in a relationship with ship, but hey, every relationship has to start somewhere.

Populating the Universe with Droids

Before we set up the relationship, let's populate our universe with some cool droids. Run this:

symfony console make:factory Droid

Open up src/factory/DroidFactory and you'll see it's already cooked up some default data for you. But let's add some spice to these droids. Replace the existing array with some of your own data and let's make these droids a bit more interesting.

Reload the fixtures with:

symfony console doctrine:fixtures:load

And there you have it! You've got a droid table filled to the brim with fascinating droids. But they're still flying solo, not yet in a relationship with starships. Let's change that with our final type of relationship, a ManyToMany.