Doctrine custom repository methods and unmanaged entities

Question

I've got custom entity repository (let's say CategoryRepository) that returns Doctrine entities. I also have newly created entity (let's say Product) that I want to persist. Product is related to Category and, in that case, Product is the owning side of the relationship so I've got following code:

$category = $categoryRepository->customGetCategory($someCriteria);
$product = new Product();
$product->setCategory($category);
$em->persist($product);

and result is

[Doctrine\ORM\ORMInvalidArgumentException]
A new entity was found through the relationship 'Acme\SomethingBundle\Entity\Product#category' that was not configured to cascade persist operations for entity: blahblah. To solve this issue: Either explicitly call EntityManager#persist() on this unknown entity or configure cascade persist this association in the mapping for example @ManyToOne(..,cascade={"persist"})

For now I'm aware that all entities returned by custom repository methods using \Doctrine\ORM\Query::getResult() method where Query object is returned by EntityManager::createQuery($dql) factory method are detached by default. So I've got entity returned by repository that exists in database and I can't find a way for doctrine to have it managed just like any entity returned by f. ex. $repository->findBy() method.

Could anyone point me in right direction with this? I'd really like to solve that, it's killing me.

could you please post your Category and Product entities? (only the code snippets of the relation between them) — ponciste

Cerad Cerad · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-26T15:56:41

This is probably one of the top 5 Doctrine questions asked. Just difficult to search for. Could try searching on the error message.

The problem is that Category::setProduct is never being called. Update your Product entity with:

class Product
{
    public function setCategory($category);
    {
        $this->category = $category;
        $category->setProduct($this); // *** Add this
    }
}

Doctrine custom repository methods and unmanaged entities

1 Answers