Doctrine2: Best way to handle many-to-many with extra columns in reference table

Question

I\'m wondering what\'s the best, the cleanest and the most simply way to work with many-to-many relations in Doctrine2.

Let\'s assume that we\'ve got an album like

Answer 1

The solution is in the documentation of Doctrine. In the FAQ you can see this :

http://docs.doctrine-project.org/en/2.1/reference/faq.html#how-can-i-add-columns-to-a-many-to-many-table

And the tutorial is here :

http://docs.doctrine-project.org/en/2.1/tutorials/composite-primary-keys.html

So you do not anymore do a manyToMany but you have to create an extra Entity and put manyToOne to your two entities.

ADD for @f00bar comment :

it's simple, you have just to to do something like this :

Article  1--N  ArticleTag  N--1  Tag

So you create an entity ArticleTag

ArticleTag:
  type: entity
  id:
    id:
      type: integer
      generator:
        strategy: AUTO
  manyToOne:
    article:
      targetEntity: Article
      inversedBy: articleTags
  fields: 
    # your extra fields here
  manyToOne:
    tag:
      targetEntity: Tag
      inversedBy: articleTags

I hope it helps