Symfony2: get Doctrine in a generic PHP class

Question

In a Symfony2 project, when you use a Controller, you can access Doctrine by calling getDoctrine() on this, i.e.:

Answer 1

You can register this class as a service and inject whatever other services into it. Suppose you have GenericClass.php as follows:

class GenericClass
{
    public function __construct()
    {
        // some cool stuff
    }
}

You can register it as service (in your bundle's Resources/config/service.yml|xml usually) and inject Doctrine's entity manager into it:

services:
    my_mailer:
        class: Path/To/GenericClass
        arguments: [doctrine.orm.entity_manager]

And it'll try to inject entity manager to (by default) constructor of GenericClass. So you just have to add argument for it:

public function __construct($entityManager)
{
     // do something awesome with entity manager
}

If you are not sure what services are available in your application's DI container, you can find out by using command line tool: php app/console container:debug and it'll list all available services along with their aliases and classes.