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

You may be able to achieve what you want with Class Table Inheritance where you change AlbumTrackReference to AlbumTrack:

class AlbumTrack extends Track { /* ... */ }

And getTrackList() would contain AlbumTrack objects which you could then use like you want:

foreach($album->getTrackList() as $albumTrack)
{
    echo sprintf("\t#%d - %-20s (%s) %s\n", 
        $albumTrack->getPosition(),
        $albumTrack->getTitle(),
        $albumTrack->getDuration()->format('H:i:s'),
        $albumTrack->isPromoted() ? ' - PROMOTED!' : ''
    );
}

You will need to examine this throughly to ensure you don't suffer performance-wise.

Your current set-up is simple, efficient, and easy to understand even if some of the semantics don't quite sit right with you.

Answer 2

You ask for the "best way" but there is no best way. There are many ways and you already discovered some of them. How you want to manage and/or encapsulate association management when using association classes is entirely up to you and your concrete domain, noone can show you a "best way" I'm afraid.

Apart from that, the question could be simplified a lot by removing Doctrine and relational databases from the equation. The essence of your question boils down to a question about how to deal with association classes in plain OOP.

Answer 3

Here is the solution as described in the Doctrine2 Documentation

<?php
use Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection;

/** @Entity */
class Order
{
    /** @Id @Column(type="integer") @GeneratedValue */
    private $id;

    /** @ManyToOne(targetEntity="Customer") */
    private $customer;
    /** @OneToMany(targetEntity="OrderItem", mappedBy="order") */
    private $items;

    /** @Column(type="boolean") */
    private $payed = false;
    /** @Column(type="boolean") */
    private $shipped = false;
    /** @Column(type="datetime") */
    private $created;

    public function __construct(Customer $customer)
    {
        $this->customer = $customer;
        $this->items = new ArrayCollection();
        $this->created = new \DateTime("now");
    }
}

/** @Entity */
class Product
{
    /** @Id @Column(type="integer") @GeneratedValue */
    private $id;

    /** @Column(type="string") */
    private $name;

    /** @Column(type="decimal") */
    private $currentPrice;

    public function getCurrentPrice()
    {
        return $this->currentPrice;
    }
}

/** @Entity */
class OrderItem
{
    /** @Id @ManyToOne(targetEntity="Order") */
    private $order;

    /** @Id @ManyToOne(targetEntity="Product") */
    private $product;

    /** @Column(type="integer") */
    private $amount = 1;

    /** @Column(type="decimal") */
    private $offeredPrice;

    public function __construct(Order $order, Product $product, $amount = 1)
    {
        $this->order = $order;
        $this->product = $product;
        $this->offeredPrice = $product->getCurrentPrice();
    }
}

Answer 4

Nothing beats a nice example

For people looking for a clean coding example of an one-to-many/many-to-one associations between the 3 participating classes to store extra attributes in the relation check this site out:

nice example of one-to-many/many-to-one associations between the 3 participating classes

Think about your primary keys

Also think about your primary key. You can often use composite keys for relationships like this. Doctrine natively supports this. You can make your referenced entities into ids. Check the documentation on composite keys here

Answer 5

This really useful example. It lacks in the documentation doctrine 2.

Very thank you.

For the proxies functions can be done :

class AlbumTrack extends AlbumTrackAbstract {
   ... proxy method.
   function getTitle() {} 
}

class TrackAlbum extends AlbumTrackAbstract {
   ... proxy method.
   function getTitle() {}
}

class AlbumTrackAbstract {
   private $id;
   ....
}

and

/** @OneToMany(targetEntity="TrackAlbum", mappedBy="album") */
protected $tracklist;

/** @OneToMany(targetEntity="AlbumTrack", mappedBy="track") */
protected $albumsFeaturingThisTrack;

Answer 6

First, I mostly agree with beberlei on his suggestions. However, you may be designing yourself into a trap. Your domain appears to be considering the title to be the natural key for a track, which is likely the case for 99% of the scenarios you come across. However, what if Battery on Master of the Puppets is a different version (different length, live, acoustic, remix, remastered, etc) than the version on The Metallica Collection.

Depending on how you want to handle (or ignore) that case, you could either go beberlei's suggested route, or just go with your proposed extra logic in Album::getTracklist(). Personally, I think the extra logic is justified to keep your API clean, but both have their merit.

If you do wish to accommodate my use case, you could have Tracks contain a self referencing OneToMany to other Tracks, possibly $similarTracks. In this case, there would be two entities for the track Battery, one for The Metallica Collection and one for Master of the Puppets. Then each similar Track entity would contain a reference to each other. Also, that would get rid of the current AlbumTrackReference class and eliminate your current "issue". I do agree that it is just moving the complexity to a different point, but it is able to handle a usecase it wasn't previously able to.