Symfony2 Doctrine get count all as integer

Question

I want to get count of all records in DB. I haven't found one recommended way to do this. So I've built in my entity repo this function:

public function countAll()
{
    return $this->createQueryBuilder('post')
        ->select('COUNT(post)')
        ->getQuery()->getSingleScalarResult()
        ;
}

and it's OK, because it returns me count of all items. I use FOSRestBundle, so my action in controller looks like:

public function getPostsCountAction() {
    return $this->em->getRepository('KamilTestBundle:Post')->countAll();
}

and result at the addres posts/count.json looks like:

"16"

But... I want to take this value as integer. I don't know why QueryBuilder returns it as string. Even if I use ->getQuery()->getResult() and dump this output it's also string, not integer.

How can I take this value as integer? It is possible?

Answer 1

intval() will return the number representation of a string.

While it might be a slippery thing to use this, you should be 100% fine since you know you will be getting only numbers.

public function countAll()
{
    return intval($this->createQueryBuilder('post')
        ->select('COUNT(post)')
        ->getQuery()->getSingleScalarResult());
}

Answer 2

return count($this->em->getRepository('KamilTestBundle:Post')->findAll());

This should return an integer (count).

An alternative could be typecasting:

 return (int) $this->em->getRepository('KamilTestBundle:Post')->countAll();

This will just convert your string to an int and should be more efficient than counting in PHP.