Question

Within the same entity I have a PreUpdate and a PrePersist. The PreUpdate fires, but the PrePersist never does. I put a die() after the flush and comments within the lifecycle callbacks. Full entity can be seen at http://pastebin.com/yUk1u4GQ

Entity callbacks

/**
* @PreUpdate
*/
public function fixDates(){
    $this->updatedOn = $this->getNow();
    $this->closedDate = null;
    $this->openDate = null;
    print "dates fixed";
}

/**
* @PrePersist
*/
public function prePersist() {
    print 'in prePersist';
    die();
}

Entity Manager calls

$em->persist($school);

$em->flush();
die();

My screen reads “dates fixed”, but not the prePersist message. I do have the @HasLifecycleCallbacks at the top of the entity.

Answer 1

PrePersist is fired only when you are performing INSERT statement, not UPDATE statement.

When testing, don’t forget that the UPDATE statement is fired only when the entity attributes really change. If the Entity Manager is being called to persist that entity, it first looks if there are any changes. If not, no sql query is performed and no @PreUpdate method is called.