Doctrine 2 integration into ZF seems to make simple things very hard and time consuming(At least for me).
I cant just give a submitted form array to doctrine to automatically map key/value pairs to doctrine entities and it gets very complicated if i have a many-to-many entity and submitted form has nested array.
In symfony, submitted form keys/values are easily and AUTOMATICALLY mapped and saved to doctrine tables. I don’t know how to do that in ZF especially if I have “Many to Many” and/or “Many to One” doctrine entities and I have **nested form elements which need multi-level iteration.
I don’t want to Set every entity explicitly and create every entity object manually**.
Pain would be alot less if i used ZF`s native database architecture.
I have done some coding and now its done half-automatically but is not very useful.
I think the best solution is to use PHP’s Reflection API to inject/retrieve values from your entities (using smart get/set detection as well). I started a little library called ObjectSerializer to help with the process but never finished. That said, if you look at the logic contained in these two classes you might get a good idea where to start.