Question

I’m having a hard time figuring out how to properly use Doctrine 2 with zend framework. I’m reading the docs and basing what I’ve done so far on that and the zendcasts. The problems actually start when I try to do relational stuff with my db, since I’m not so sure how to use doctrine collections. In my test case, I have an User entity:

class User 
{
/**
 * @var integer
 * @Column (name="id", type="integer", nullable=false)
 * @Id
 * @GenerateValue(strategy="IDENTIY")
 * 
 */
private $id;

/**
 * @Column(type="string",length=60,nullable=true)
 * @var string
 */
private $email;

/**
 * 
 * @param \Doctring\Common\Collections\Collection $property
 * @OneToMany(targetEntity="Countries",mappedBy="user", cascade={"persist", "remove"})
 */
private $countries;

public function __get($property) 
{
    return $this->$property;
}

public function __set($property, $value)
{
    $this->$property = $value;
}
}

Which is related to the countries entity:

class Countries {
/**
 * @var integer
 * @Column (name="id", type="integer", nullable=false)
 * @Id
 * @GenerateValue(strategy="IDENTIY")
 * 
 */
private $id;

/**
 *
 * @var string
 * @Column(type="string") 
 */
private $countryName;

/**
 *
 * @var User
 * @ManyToOne(targetEntity="User") 
 * @JoinColumns({
 *  @JoinColumn(name="user_id", referencedColumnName="id")
 * })
 */
private $user;


public function __get($property) 
{
    return $this->$property;
}

public function __set($property, $value)
{
    $this->$property = $value;
}
}

Now I can assign the countries from the controller with something like this:

    $p1 = new \Federico\Entity\Countries();
    $p1->countryName = 'Argentina';
    $p2 = new \Federico\Entity\Countries();
    $p2->countryName = 'España';
    $u = new \Federico\Entity\User();
    $u->firstname = 'John';
    $u->lastname = 'Doe';
    $u->id = 1;

which would show me this object:

object(Federico\Entity\User)[109]
  private 'id' => int 1
  private 'email' => null
  private 'countries' => 
array
  0 => 
    object(Federico\Entity\Countries)[107]
      private 'id' => null
      private 'countryName' => string 'Argentina' (length=9)
      private 'user' => null
  1 => 
    object(Federico\Entity\Countries)[108]
      private 'id' => null
      private 'countryName' => string 'España' (length=7)
      private 'user' => null
  public 'firstname' => string 'John' (length=4)
  public 'lastname' => string 'Doe' (length=3)

If you pay attention to this, you’ll see that the user property is set to null in the country objects. I don’t understand if this is supposed to happen like this or not. Also, since users will be allowed to choose the countries from a checkbox list, and they’ll be able to choose more than one country,…shouldn’t the countries somehow be stored in the Db?

Answer 1

I don’t see where you assign country to a user in your code. Anyway, you need to do two things:

Initialize $countries variable as a new Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection in User constructor.

Manually connect country with user:

public function addCountry(Country $c)
{
  if (!$this->countries->contains($c)) {
    $this->countries->add($c);
    $c->user = $user;
  }
}