symfony2 or doctrine are removing username field from my entities -- why?

Question

Update: It's not just username that's this affects. I even tried renaming the column to foo in my schema, and still it always returns null for that column!

My database is in MySQL (InnoDB). I have a users table, containing the properties ID, username, name, email, password. Table has a bunch of users inserted in it.

On the Doctrine side, my AppBundle\Entity\User class is correctly defined. I can query my users and get a list of them, with all the columns intact -- except for the username column.

Despite username being defined in PHP:

/**
 * User
 *
 * @ORM\Table(name="user", uniqueConstraints={@ORM\UniqueConstraint(name="username_UNIQUE", columns={"username"})})
 * @ORM\Entity
 */
class User
{
    /**
     * @var string
     *
     * @ORM\Column(name="username", type="string", length=45,  nullable=false)
     */
    private $username;

    // ...


    /**
     * Set username
     *
     * @param string $username
     *
     * @return User
     */
    public function setUsername($username)
    {
        $this->username = $username;

        return $this;
    }

    /**
     * Get username
     *
     * @return string
     */
    public function getUsername()
    {
        return $this->username;
    }

When I get the entities and dump them, the username field has mysteriously been nulled:

User {#389 ▼
  -id: 2
  -username: null
  -name: "Sam"
  -password: XXX
  -email: XXX
  -oPhone: ""
  -mPhone: XXX
  -hPhone: ""
  -institutions: PersistentCollection {#390 ▶}
}

Even though it definitely exists and is not null on the database:

mysql> SELECT * FROM user WHERE id=2

# ID, username, name, password, email, o_phone, m_phone, h_phone
2, sjw, Sam, XXX, XXX, , XXX,

And trying to access the field via PHP results in it complaining that no such username field exists, preventing me from doing user auth using this entity.

I'm not using any custom app bundles in Symfony, which is version 2.7.6 (with doctrine2), on PHP 5.4.
I've cleared my caches, made sure I haven't had any Doctrine-generated .yml or .xml models lying around.
I've sanity-checked my database -- using the sqlalchemy Python library and sqlacodegen I have a python version of my ORM. That has no problems with the username column, results appear as they should, rather than being null or NoneType.
I've temporarily disabled the SecurityBundle to see if it was removing the username behind the scenes -- the field is still nulled.
I've pored over the Symfony docs...

Nope, out of ideas. What is Symfony doing behind the scenes?

"And trying to access the field via PHP" are you using $user->getUsername() when you the error? — Cerad
Can't recall what the error was -- when I was trying to use the class for user authentication, the framework was throwing errors about username not being a field (even when it was set to public). That was yesterday's work, however.. :p — Owain Jones

Owain Jones Owain Jones · Accepted Answer · 2015-11-13T16:22:22

So it turns out it was a cache problem, as the chosen answer here explains. I completely forgot that I had enabled APC to cache database entries! Turns out it was also caching the database metadata and various bits of code, so even when I was clearing everything else out, the APC cache didn't get updated.

This was the culprit, these lines in config.yml which should only have been in config_prod.yml:

    doctrine:
        orm:
            metadata_cache_driver: apc
            result_cache_driver: apc
            query_cache_driver: apc

(Another solution might have been to just restart php-fpm, as that's how I'm running PHP in my environment -- something that would have taken a second to do but I didn't think of for a whole two days... doh...)

symfony2 or doctrine are removing username field from my entities -- why?

1 Answers