Question

My problem is simple:

I have Users and Stories in a many to many relationship, I would like to store a couple of attribute in the UserStory relationship:

• Priority (In order to set the ordering of the display for a given user)
• Main (flags which one is the main story)

How can I do that ?

Let say we have the following :

<?php
/** @Entity */
class User
{
    // ...

    /**
     * @ManyToMany(targetEntity="Story", inversedBy="users")
     * @JoinTable(name="users_stories")
     */
    private $stories;

    public function __construct() {
        $this->stories = new \Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection();
    }

    // ...
}

/** @Entity */
class Story
{
    // ...
    /**
     * @ManyToMany(targetEntity="User", mappedBy="stories")
     */
    private $users;

    public function __construct() {
        $this->users = new \Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection();
    }

    // ...
}
?>

Answer 1

As Crozin suggested, this question is a duplicate of:

• Doctrine2: Best way to handle many-to-many with extra columns in reference table

In my specific case the solution is simple. The Many-To-Many relationship needs to be build by hand, and extra fields need to be added manually. So two OneToMany relationship need to be build.

So here are my 3 objects and the associated meta information for each attribute:

<?php

/**
 * @Entity
 * @Table(name="users")
 */

class User{

    /**
     * @Id
     * @Column(type="integer", name="id")
     * @GeneratedValue(strategy="IDENTITY")
     */
    private $id;

    /**
     * @OneToMany(targetEntity="UserStory", mappedBy="user")
     */
    private $user_stories;

    // ...
}


/**
 * @Entity
 * @Table(name="user_stories")
 */

class UserStory{
    /**
     * @Id
     * @Column(type="integer", name="id")
     * @GeneratedValue(strategy="IDENTITY")
     */
    private $id;

    /**
     * @ManyToOne(targetEntity="User", inversedBy="user_stories")
     */
    private $user;

    /**
     * @ManyToOne(targetEntity="Story", inversedBy="user_stories")
     */
    private $stories;

    /**
     * @Column(type="integer")
     */
    private $priority;

    /**
     * @Column(type="integer")
     */
    private $priority_tmp;

    /**
     * @Column(type="integer")
     */
    private $main;

    // ...
}


/**
 * @Entity
 * @Table(name="stories")
 */

class Story
{
    /**
     * @Id
     * @Column(type="integer", name="id")
     * @GeneratedValue(strategy="IDENTITY")
     */
    private $id;

    /**
     * @OneToMany(targetEntity="UserStory", mappedBy="stories")
     */
    private $user_stories;

    // ...
}
?>