Question

I’m having strange problems when trying to persist a class of User that has a reference to many UserProperties. Note that a UserProperty will be managed by a cascade:persist.

UserProperties itself has a reference to a Property.

When creating a new User with a new UserProperty (which itself has a reference to an existing Property) it throws strange (strange as in i didn’t expect it) error:
InvalidArgumentException: A new entity was found through the relationship ‘UserProperty#property’ that was not configured to cascade persist operations for entity

User:

class User extends IdentifiableObject {
// … other vars

/**
 * @OneToMany(targetEntity="UserProperty", mappedBy="user", cascade={"persist", "remove"}, orphanRemoval=true)
 */
private $userProperties = null;

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

// … other methods
public function getUserProperties() {
    return $this->userProperties;
}

public function setUserProperties($userProperties)  {
    $this->userProperties = $userProperties;
}

public function addUserProperty(UserProperty $userProperty) {
    $userProperty->setUser($this);
    $this->userProperties[] = $userProperty;
}
}

UserProperty:

class UserProperty extends IdentifiableObject {
/**
 * @OneToOne(targetEntity="Property")
 * @JoinColumn(name="propertyID")
 */
private $property;

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

public function setProperty($property) {
    $this->property = $property;
}
}

Property class has no references to either class.

And finally my testClass using PHPUnit:

class UserDaoTest extends PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase {
private static $userDao;
private static $propertyDao;

public static function setUpBeforeClass() {
    //this will make the EntityManager called inside our DAOImpl point to our test database...
    define('__DBNAME__', 'db_test');
    createCleanTestDatabase();
    self::$userDao = new UserDaoImpl();
    self::$propertyDao = new PropertyDaoImpl();
}

public function testEntityClassVariable() {
    $this->assertEquals("User", self::$userDao->getEntityClass());
}

public function testPersistUserWithoutProperties() {
    $user = new User();
    $user->setUserName("tester1");
    $user->setUserType(1);

    self::$userDao->persist($user);
    self::$userDao->flush();

    $this->assertEquals(1, count(self::$userDao->findAll()));
}

public function testPersistUserWithProperties() {
    $user = new User();
    $user->setUserName("tester2");
    $user->setUserType(1);

    $property = new Property();
    $property->setName("propertyName");
    $property->setType(1);

    self::$propertyDao->persist($property);
    self::$propertyDao->flush();


    $userProperty = new UserProperty();
    $userProperty->setProperty($property);
    $userProperty->setValue("test");

    $user->addUserProperty($userProperty);

    self::$userDao->persist($user);
    self::$userDao->flush();

    $this->assertEquals(2, count(self::$userDao->findAll()));

    $userInDB = self::$userDao->find($user);

    $this->assertNotNull($userInDB);

    $this->assertEquals(1, count($userInDB->getUserProperties()));
}
}

The strange thing is that the Property is indeed created in the Database.
Also the test works perfectly fine IF i use the userDao->persist to save the Property (instead of the propertyDao…

Any help would be appreciated, thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The problem was that i was using a different entityManager in each dao so effectively having a different UnitOfWork for each DAO. When i made the entity a singleton so that each DAO had the same reference to it.