Question

Let’s say i have two Doctrine entities:

Users and Messages

Every user can have ‘n’ messages.

Now I want to display the mailbox for a user so I fetch the user entity from the ORM and from this entity I get all messages. No problem so far.

But now i want to have some more complexe filtering of the messages. For example: Max age, Max count, blacklisting some words etc. So the default getter method of the entity for getting the messages isn’t enough.

How can i solve this?

A entity repository is the first thing i found but then i have to ask this repoitory from outside of the user object which breaks the relationship of user and message (repository->getMessagesForUser(userId,…) instead of user->getMessages(…)) which doesn’t look like a ‘clean’ OOP solution for me.

Another way i could think of is to ignore all this fancy ORM stuff and write my own models and getting the informations from the database on the lowest ORM or even DBAL layer. And ether wrap the entity or fill the fields of my own models manually. But then i ask myself: “Why did i use Doctrine?”.

So what’s the best practice for this case. By the way i use Symfony 2.

Answer 1

In this specific case, I would definitely make the Message its own aggregate, and therefore would create a Repository for it, and remove the relationship from User to Message. The User can have many Messages anyway, so it would be very inefficient to use the other approach.

I would then create specific methods in the MessageRepository:

class MessageRepository
{
    public function findByUser(User $user) {
        // ...
    }
    public function findReadMessagesByUser(User $user) {
        // ...
    }
}