Question

I’m sure there’s a simple solution to this, but I can’t fathom what’s going on. I have an entity called a Payment and two other entities called User and Household.

A User has many Payments and and a Household has many Payments. This is all mapped as unidirectional manyToOne relationships of the Payment using YAML, like this (hopefully this is in line with the guidance at http://docs.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-orm/en/2.1/reference/association-mapping.html#many-to-one-unidirectional) –

Payment:
  type: entity
  table: payments
  id:
    _id:
      type: integer
      column: payment_id
      generator:
        strategy: AUTO
    manyToOne:
    _user:
      targetEntity: Application_Model_User
      joinColumn:
        name: user_id
        referencedColumnName: payment_id
    _household:
      targetEntity: Application_Model_Household
      joinColumn:
        name: household_id
        referencedColumnName: payment_id

Database wise, I have three tables, users, payments and households. The payments table has (in addition to it’s primary key) two columns called user_id and household_id, which correspond the to primary keys of the other two tables.

The problem is that when I try to persist a new Payment I get an error back from mySql telling me that the user_id column of payments cannot be null. Some digging has established that doctrine is supplying null for both user_id and household_id in the INSERT statement. The object graph is definitely correct.

In addition, I get the following warnings:

Notice: Undefined index: payment_id in [..]/library/Doctrine/ORM/Persisters/BasicEntityPersister.php on line 511

Notice: Undefined index: in [..]/library/Doctrine/ORM/Persisters/BasicEntityPersister.php on line 511

Notice: Undefined index: payment_id in [..]/library/Doctrine/ORM/Persisters/BasicEntityPersister.php on line 511

Notice: Undefined index: in [..]/library/Doctrine/ORM/Persisters/BasicEntityPersister.php on line 511

I’ve established that the payment_id in question is coming from the referencedColumnNames in my mapping, and that the index is undefined because the array doctrine is searching contains the fields from the opposite side of the relationship, i.e. the Household or the User. But surely it shouldn’t be? I think I’ve followed the guide, but I can’t make it work.

I’m using Zend Framework, if it helps, but there’s nothing special going on my code. I’m pretty sure it’s a mapping problem.

Thanks

Answer 1

I’ve only worked with Doctrine + Symfony2, but I think your referencedColumnName should just be “id”, not payment_id, because you need to explain the foreign key relationship.

payment.household_id –references–> household.id.

In Symfony2 there is an ‘inversedBy’ property for Doctrine, which is used to map the column in the other table that would represent the payment_id.

A snippet of code from a Symfony2 Mapping:

/**
* @ORM\ManyToOne(targetEntity="kurtfunai\WalkthroughBundle\Entity\Group", inversedBy="members")
* @ORM\JoinColumn(name="fk_group_id", referencedColumnName="id")
*/
protected $group;

In your case it would need altered to something like this:

_user:
  targetEntity: Application_Model_User
  joinColumn:
    name: user_id
    referencedColumnName: <USERS_TABLE_PRIMARY_KEY_COLUMN_NAME>
_household:
  targetEntity: Application_Model_Household
  joinColumn:
    name: household_id
    referencedColumnName: <HOUSEHOLDS_TABLE_PRIMARY_KEY_COLUMN_NAME>

(Replace with the appropriate column names)