Question

How do I perform queries in an entity?

namespace Entities\Members;

/**
 * @Entity(repositoryClass="\Entities\Member\MembersRepository")
 * @Table(name="Members")
 * @HasLifecycleCallbacks
 */
class Members extends \Entities\AbstractEntity
{
    /**
     * @Id @Column(name="id", type="bigint",length=15)
     * @GeneratedValue(strategy="AUTO")
     */
    protected $id;

    /** 
     * @Column(name="userid", type="bigint", length=26, nullable=true) 
     */
    protected $userid;

    /** 
     * @Column(name="fname", type="string", length=255,nullable=true) 
     */
    protected $fname;

    /**
     *  @OneToMany(targetEntity="\Entities\Users\Wall", mappedBy="entry", cascade={"persist"}) 
     */
    protected $commententries;

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

Example I would like to have a function inside this entity called: filter()
and I want to be able to filter the commententries collection. It should return a collection with a certain condition such id=1. Basically it should be filtering the data received from the join query.

So something like this:

$this->commententries->findBy(array('id' => 1));

But obviously this does not work.

Answer 1

Generally speaking, you shouldn’t do this.

Entities, as a rule of thumb, should not know about the entitymanager (directly, or via some intermediary object).

The reason for this is mostly testability, but in my experience, it helps keeps things organized in other ways.

I’d approach it by designing a service class that handles the lookups for you. Your controller (or whatever) would drive it like this:

<?php
// create a new service, injecting the entitymanager.  if you later wanted 
// to start caching some things, you might inject a cache driver as well.
$member = $em->find('Member',$member_id); //get a member, some how.
$svc = new MemberService($em);

$favoriteCommentaries = $svc->getFavoriteCommentaries($member);

As I hint in the comment, if you decide later that you want to add caching (via memcached, for instance) to avoid frequent lookups, you’d do that somewhere near or in this service class. This keeps your entities nice and simple, and easily testable. Since you inject your entitymanager into the service at construction-time, you can mock that as needed.

getFavoriteCommentaries() could use various implementations. A trivial one would be to proxy it to Member::getFavoriteCommentaries(), which would actually load everything, and then filter out the “favorite” ones. That probably won’t scale particularly well, so you could improve it by using the EM to fetch just the data you need.