Question

Here, there’s an explanation on “How to generate Entities from an Existing Database”.

I have a table person. And a table address. A person can have many different addresses, and an address can be related to one ore more persons. So this is a “many to many” relationship. Thus I’ve created an “in-between” table I’ve called personaddress where there’s a idPersonne and idAddress.

When launching the generation everything is fine but the many to many relationship (there are more than one).

PersonneAdresse:
    type: entity
    table: personne_adresse
    fields:
        id:
            id: true
            type: bigint
            nullable: false
            generator:
                strategy: IDENTITY
    manyToOne:
        idPersonne:
            targetEntity: Personne
            cascade: {  }
            mappedBy: null
            inversedBy: null
            joinColumns:
                id_personne:
                    referencedColumnName: id
            orphanRemoval: false
        idAdresse:
            targetEntity: Adresse
            cascade: {  }
            mappedBy: null
            inversedBy: null
            joinColumns:
                id_adresse:
                    referencedColumnName: id
            orphanRemoval: false
    lifecycleCallbacks: {  }

The documentation about oneToMany is not enough (I need an example to understand):

If you have oneToMany relationships between your entities, you will
need to edit the generated xml or yml files to add a section on the
specific entities for oneToMany defining the inversedBy and the
mappedBy pieces.

And I’m pretty sure the modification is not only about oneToMany, but manyToMany too.
Can you explain me what I should do/modify to be able to generate properly the corresponding entities?

Answer 1

Here’s how I did the stuff: I’ve generated the whole files, but I knew there were some ManyToMany relationships. So I declared them “manually” in the corresponding files. Then I’ve encountered another problem. In the documentation, the codes samples aren’t 100% correct. You have to do this add “@ORM\” instead of the simple “@“. Here my code that works:

/**
 * @ORM\ManyToMany(targetEntity="Adresse", inversedBy="personnes")
 * @ORM\JoinTable(name="personne_adresse")
 **/
private $adresses;
/**
 * @ORM\ManyToMany(targetEntity="Partenaire", inversedBy="personnes")
 * @ORM\JoinTable(name="personne_partenaire")
 **/
private $partenaires;
/**
 * @ORM\ManyToMany(targetEntity="Telephone", inversedBy="personnes")
 * @ORM\JoinTable(name="personne_telephone")
 **/
private $telephones;

public function __construct() {
    $this->adresses = new \Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection();
    $this->partenaires = new \Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection();
    $this->telephones = new \Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection();
}

Moreover, you have to delete corresponding ManyToMany Php files, because Symfony 2 (I guess) handle those “in-between” ManyToMany tables itself => no need to declare. In my sample, I had to delete “PersonneAdresse.php“, “PersonnePartenaire.php” and “PersonneTelephone.php“.