Question

I’m using Doctrine ORM in a project that I am working on. Although the idea of providing an object interface to the db is nice, I have a question about the implementation of the entity classes.

Let’s consider this example of a User entity:

<?php

/**
 * @Entity @Table(name="users")
 **/
class User
{
    /**
     * @Id @GeneratedValue @Column(type="integer")
     * @var int
     **/
    protected $id;

    /**
     * @Column(type="string")
     * @var string
     **/
    protected $name;

    /**
     * @OneToMany(targetEntity="Bug", mappedBy="reporter")
     * @var Bug[]
     **/
    protected $reportedBugs = null;

    /**
     * @OneToMany(targetEntity="Bug", mappedBy="engineer")
     * @var Bug[]
     **/
    protected $assignedBugs = null;

    // .. (other code)
}

Now, its all fine and dandy, but I was wondering what would happen if I make a spelling mistake in one of the comments e.g. I write:

@Table(name="users)

instead of

@Table(name="users")

the IDE will not complain since its a comment, and I’ll only get an error when I run the “generate entities” command (that does the magic in the background of generating code, creating tables, columns and relationships).

So my question is: Aren’t entity definitions for ORM error prone? since there really is no check on the syntax if its valid, and errors are generated only at ‘generate’ time. Is there a way to automate / check for mistakes earlier on while development?

Thanks!

Answer 1

IMO, The issue that you highlighted can be compared to using wrong variables in PHP ($var1 instead of $var2). For that matter, in all dynamic languages.

But you can avoid the problem highlighted by you, if you write unit tests.