Question

I’ve been strugling with those feature (attach/merge feature).

My need is simple, I have a BookFilterType which filters a collection of Book object.

Until now, when doing

public function indexAction()
{
    $book = new Book($this->getUser());
    $filters = $this->getFilters();
    $form = $this->createForm(new BookFilterType(), $filters);

    ...
    return array(...);
}

I got an error : Entities passed to the choice field must be managed because in the filter they were others entities.

So basically, i needed to store only ID’s when saving the filters criterias in the session, and then re-hydrate them using find($id).

But this is ugly, and my code gets unreadable !

So i’ve decided to go with the detach / merge feature.

After storing detached entities i want to merge them again to re-inject values in the form, it seems that I need to use cascade={"merge"} on my Object because i get :

Class Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection is not a valid entity or mapped super class.

THE QUESTION (finally)

Where do i put the cascade={"merge"} : On the joinColumns OR inverseJoinColumns ? or BOTH ? ? Cause I have only ManyToMany associations in those filters

/**
 * @ORM\ManyToMany(targetEntity="MyTargetedEntity")
 * @ORM\JoinTable(name="target_entity_nn",
 *      joinColumns={@ORM\JoinColumn(name="some_id", referencedColumnName="id")},
 *      inverseJoinColumns={@ORM\JoinColumn(name="other_id", referencedColumnName="id")}
 *      )
 *
 **/
private $contributors;

PS: i’m using Symfony2.1 / Doctrine master.

Thanks

Answer 1

You can put it on the @ORM\ManyToMany

http://docs.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-orm/en/latest/reference/annotations-reference.html#manytomany