Many-to-Many, Doctrine's Entity Generator and Pluralization

Question

Doctrine's many-to-many logic is confusing me a bit. I have a pretty simple many-to-many relationship of recipes to categories. My base entity classes are equally simple.

The Recipe entity class...

class Recipe
{
    /**
     * @ORM\ManyToMany(targetEntity="Category", inversedBy="categories")
     * @ORM\JoinTable(name="recipe_category")
     **/
    private $categories;

    /**
     * @var integer
     *
     * @ORM\Column(name="id", type="integer")
     * @ORM\Id
     * @ORM\GeneratedValue(strategy="AUTO")
     */
    private $id;

    /**
     * @var string
     *
     * @ORM\Column(name="title", type="string", length=255)
     */
    private $title;


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

And the Category entity class...

class Category
{
    /**
     * @ORM\ManyToMany(targetEntity="Recipe")
     **/
    private $recipes;

    /**
     * @var integer
     *
     * @ORM\Column(name="id", type="integer")
     * @ORM\Id
     * @ORM\GeneratedValue(strategy="AUTO")
     */
    private $id;

    /**
     * @var string
     *
     * @ORM\Column(name="name", type="string", length=255)
     */
    private $name;


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

Seems pretty strait forward and matches Doctrine (and Symfony2's) documentation examples. The strange behavior comes when I try and generate the getters and setters for these classes via the Symfony console app.

The relationship setters/getters are incorrect. Take, for instance, the Category setter in the Recipe class that's generated...

/**
 * Add categories
 *
 * @param \Namespace\CookbookBundle\Entity\Category $categories
 * @return Recipe
 */
public function addCategorie(\Namespace\CookbookBundle\Entity\Category $categories)
{
    $this->categories[] = $categories;

    return $this;
}

It looks like the auto-generation of the method name is off. It should be "addCategory" and should be passed a "category."

While I can just correct this manually, if I re-run the entity generator, it will just add them again.

Am I doing this incorrectly or is this just a quirk of the entity generator? Can I specify an over-ride via annotation?

Well what looks weird is that it is neither addCategories or addCategory but addCategorie... — cheesemacfly
Agreed. I thought I might have screwed up some of the annotation but nothing seems to affect it which leads me to believe it's more of a core issue than an annotation/configuration problem. — CVEEP
I ran into the same issue myself. Just correct manually, then run doctrine:generate:entities whenever you want, it won't replace your existing methods, and the misspelled methods won't hurt anything. — keyboardSmasher
On my project, i have a many to many relationship between msgCategory and superCategory entities, the generator gave me the methods: addMsgCategory and getMsgCategories — fkoessler

Reza S Reza S · Accepted Answer · 2013-12-12T00:45:23

You're not doing anything wrong as that's how symfony generates them. I usually don't use the app/console to generate them as currently they're not doing a good job. One example is as you've mentioned the pluralization of words as you've mentioned. Another obvious one is the fact that it's using the [] notation which is pretty much treating an ArrayCollection object as a PHP array. You should never treat ArrayCollections as arrays.

This is how I have implemented it myself:

public function addCategory(Category $category)
{
    if (!$this->categories->contains($category)
        $this->categories->add($category);

    return $this;
}

Which doesn't add duplicates to the Array collection if it's already added. Same thing goes with remove:

public function removeCategory(Category $category)
{
    if ($this->categories->contains($category)
        $this->categories->remove($category);
}

What I've run into many times is let's say you have 4 categories and you add and remove them

$r = new Recipe();
$c1 = new Category();
$c2 = new Category();


$r->addCategory($c1);
$r->addCategory($c2);
// at this point $r->getCategories()->toArray()[0] contains $c1
// and $r->getCategories()->toArray()[1] contains $c2

$r->removeCategory($c1);
// now $r->getCategories()->toArray()[0] is empty and
// $r->getCategories()->toArray()[1] contains $c2 still
// so in order to get the first category you need to:

$r->getCategories()->first();

Many-to-Many, Doctrine's Entity Generator and Pluralization

2 Answers