Question

I have following entity:

class Employee {

/**
 * @ORM\Id
 * @ORM\Column(type="integer")
 * @ORM\GeneratedValue(strategy="AUTO")
 */
protected $employeeId;

/**
 * @ORM\Column(type="string", length=45, unique=true)
 */
protected $username;

/**
 * @ORM\Column(type="string", length=255, nullable=false)
 */
protected $email;

and I’m running following code:

$employee = new Employee();
$employee->setUsername('test');

$em = $this->getDoctrine()->getManager();
$em->persist($employee);
$em->flush();

As you can see I didn’t set value for email column.

But on persists I get:

SQLSTATE[23000]: Integrity constraint violation: 1048 Column ’email’ cannot be null

because Doctrine adds all entity columns to the INSERT query and set null value for email column.

Is there a way to skip not set columns on insert? Or to make Doctrine insert ” (empty string) as default value for non null, string columns?

Answer 1

You may either allow your column to be null, setting nullable=true:

/**
 * @ORM\Column(type="string", length=255, nullable=true)
 */
protected $email;

This won’t raise the SQL error. But if you want to be consistent, use validation so you can deal with empty fields before persistance:

use Symfony\Component\Validator\Constraints as Assert;

...

/**
 * @Assert\NotBlank()
 * @ORM\Column(type="string", length=255)
 */
protected $email;

This way you can handle validation errors in a more specific way, like stated in docs for example:

$author = new Author();
// ... do something to the $author object

$validator = $this->get('validator');
$errors = $validator->validate($author);

if (count($errors) > 0) {
    return new Response(print_r($errors, true));
} else {
    return new Response('The author is valid! Yes!');
}

If you want just plain default values for columns, have a look at this question.