Question

I am working on a project that utilizes Zend Framework 1.12 integrated with doctrine 2. I am having trouble with a Bidirectional One-to-Many relation in said project.
The two entities concerning my problem are Team and Player; a team can have many players.

The Team Entity:

namespace Entities;

use Doctrine\Common\Collections\Collection,
    Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection;

/**
 * @Entity(repositoryClass="Repositories\TeamRepository")
 * @Table(name="team")
 */
class Team extends Entity{

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

/**
 * @OneToMany(targetEntity="Player", mappedBy="team")
 */
protected $players;

public function __construct() {
    $this->players = new ArrayCollection();
}


public function getName(){
    return $this->name;
}

public function setName($name) {
    $this->name = $name;
    return $this;
}

public function getPlayers() {
    return $this->players;
}

And the Player Entity:

namespace Entities;

/**
* @Entity(repositoryClass="Repositories\PlayerRepository")
* @Table(name="player")
*/
class Player extends Entity{

    public function __construct() {

    }

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

    /**
     * @ManyToOne(targetEntity="Team", inversedBy="players")
     * @JoinColumn(name="team_id", referencedColumnName="id")
     */
    protected $team;

    public function getName(){
        return $this->name;
    }

    public function setName($name) {
        $this->name = $name;
        return $this;
    }

    public function getTeam() {
        return $this->team;
    }

    public function setTeam($team) {
        $this->team = $team;
        return $this;
    }

}

Now in my player controller for example I can retrieve a player and get the team name

$oPlayer    = $this->_em->find('Entities\Player', $player_id);
$teamname   = $oPlayer->getTeam()->getName();

This works as expected and I successfully obtain the name of the players team.
However the other way around does not work. I can not retrieve all the players given a team

$oTeam = $this->_em->find('Entities\Team', $team_id);
$oPlayers = $oTeam->getPlayers();

When I var_dump this the result looks like

object(Doctrine\ORM\PersistentCollection)#238 (9) {
  ["snapshot":"Doctrine\ORM\PersistentCollection":private]=>
  array(0) {
  }
  ["owner":"Doctrine\ORM\PersistentCollection":private]=>
  object(Entities\Team)#195 (7) {
     ...
  }

Note that a persistenCollection seems to be build, however the array is empty.
I have read the doctrine manual extensively and googled my behind off and am now at a loss.

Also the fact that there is no error message, I am having a hard time solving this problem.
Any pointers would be more than welcome.

Answer 1

The problem has been resolved. I have been trying to puzzle the solution together for posterity but have come to the conclusion that I no longer have the files where I now suspect the original error was located. I managed to get a working copy derived from another project. By brute force ‘diff’-ing and replacing code I traced the error of the empty array of the persistent collection, to my bootstrap and resources/doctrine.php config file, which unfortunately I do not have any longer and therefore can not confirm this. With string(4) “team” still being returned (as discussed in the comments) embarrassingly I finally found out that it was just due to a die() I put in the doctrine library file and forgot about.