Question

While reading the Doctrine documentation, I found this example:

/**
 * @Entity
 * @InheritanceType("SINGLE_TABLE")
 * @DiscriminatorColumn(name="discr", type="string")
 * @DiscriminatorMap({"person" = "Person", "employee" = "Employee"})
 */
class Person
{
    /**
     * @Id @Column(type="integer")
     * @GeneratedValue
     */
    protected $id;

    /**
     * @Column(type="string", length=50)
     */
    protected $name;
}

/**
 * @Entity
 */
class Employee extends Person
{
    /**
     * @Column(type="string", length=50)
     */
    private $department;
}

According to the doc, the Employee class can be queried this way:

SELECT e FROM Entities\Employee e WHERE e.name = 'test';

My question is: what if Person and Employee both had a name property, with different scopes and values? For example:

class Person {
    private $name;
}

class Employee extends Person {
    private $name;
}

My guess is that this query would be ran against Employee::$name:

SELECT e FROM Entities\Employee e WHERE e.name = 'test';

Would it be possible then, to query against Person::$name, while still returning only Employee instances? Something like:

SELECT e FROM Entities\Employee e WHERE e.parent.name = 'test';

Answer 1

With Doctrine you actually can have only one unique property name per hierarchy, which will be used in Entity, so overriding class properties in this way is not a good idea.

The only way to have different values in this example is to define different property names and database fields:

class Person
{
    // ...

    /**
     * @ORM\Column(type="string", length=50)
     */
    protected $name;
}

class Employee extends Person
{
    // ...

    /**
     * @ORM\Column(type="string", length=50, name="employeeName")
     */
    protected $employeeName;
}