Doctrine 2.x CRUD

Question

I heard a lot of good stuff about ORM Doctrine. I can put lot of effort learning Doctrine using a great tutorial like http://www.phpandstuff.com/articles/codeigniter-doctrine-from-scratch-day-1-install-and-setup, but it is quite outdated and is using Doctrine 1.x. I prefer learning Doctrine 2.x immediately in order to save time.

I managed to install Doctrine 2.1 in combination with Codeigniter 2.0.3. I've already managed to do some basic operations like adding new objects and save them to the database. Now I'm trying something that shouldn't be too difficult, but I've spent quite some time to find out how to do the following:

In case I want to create an object using $_POST data, I don't want to assign every property separately in code. I'd prefer something like $u->fromArray, e.g. as shown in

$data = array(
'username' => 'myuser',
'password' => 'mypass',
'email' => '[email protected]'
);

$u = new User();
$u->fromArray($data);
$u->save();

Source: http://www.phpandstuff.com/articles/codeigniter-doctrine-day-5-database-crud

However, fromArray() doesn't exist in Doctrine 2.x anymore. Is there an equivalent for fromArray() in Doctrine 2.x?

Second question: I find it pretty hard to get started. The official documents focus mainly on Doctrine. It would be very nice to have a practical example that includes things as form validation, crud operations etc. It would be very nice to have a MVC example project using Doctrine 2. Does anyone know of such a tutorial or example project?

Answer 1

The answer is really that it's up to you. Your entities are just plain-old-PHP-objects -- so it's up to you to teach them tricks (like implementing a fromArray() method), or build up infrastructure around them.

Some options, which may or not be appropriate for your use-case:

• Write constructors for your entities that populate properties: new Article($title, $author, $abstract, $body) or new Article($arrayOrObject)
• Write a static factory method
• Write your own fromArray() implementation
• Write your own fromArray() implementation in an abstract class that all your entities inherit, and possibly override, as necessary

Answer 2

In every example I've seen and in my experience coding with Doctrine2, the right way to create an object from $_POST data is to set each property individually using setters in the entity classes.

fromArray() certainly seems convenient, but knowing how Doctrine2 handles associations, I couldn't see it getting you very far.

Regarding a good CRUD tutorial for Doctrine2, you might like this sample chapter from the book "Easy PHP Websites with Zend Framework." The book itself is on ZF rather than CodeIgniter, but there's very little in the sample chapter that is Zend-specific. You'll likely prefer to stay away from the z2d2 sample repository however.

Beyond that, this site has a number of helpful questions and answers on Doctrine2 that apply to a CRUD context. Continue posting and I'm sure I or one of the others here can help.

Answer 3

You can convert an array into object using some third party Doctrine modules like DoctrineModule, instead of implementing fromArray() or populate(). For example you can do something like:

use DoctrineModule\Stdlib\Hydrator\DoctrineObject as DoctrineHydrator;

$hydrator = new DoctrineHydrator($objectManager);

$data = array(
    'username' => 'myuser',
    'password' => 'mypass',
    'email' => '[email protected]'
);

$user = new User();
$user = $hydrator->hydrate($data, $user);

$em->persist($user);
$em->flush();