Question

I have two entities that represent users (User) and friendship requests (FriendshipRequest). There is a oneToMany relationship between User and FriendshipRequest, so Doctrine creates a method that is called getFriendshipRequests() in the class User. This is ok, but FriendshipRequest has an attribute that is called status, so I would like that the User class could filter the friendship requests associated to it attending to their status. I have read Doctrine documentation, and I found out this:

Natively you can’t filter associations in 2.0 and 2.1. You should use
DQL queries to query for the filtered set of entities.

According to this, I suppose that I should create a FriendshipRequest repository and create a method called “findByStatusAndUser” (or something like that), but I think that’s a crappy solution.

I would like to have a method in the User entity, like getPendingStatusRequests(). Is this possible? If it isn’t, what would be the best solution?

Answer 1

I think that “getPendingRequestsForUser($user)” method in the FriendshipRequest repository should be a good solution. Inside this method you just need to create an appropriate DQL.

This is a good solution, because all of the logic should be moved to repositories, leaving entities as small and clean as possible.

UPD: Also, you could use findBy method, as described here, ex:

$pendingRequests = $em->getRepository('MyBundle:FriendshipRequest')->findBy(
    array('user' => $user->getId(), 'status' => 1)
);

But for me, first method is preferred.