Deep cloning an object : Clone vs Serialize

Question

I have this function duplicateCourseAction whose goal is to ... duplicate a Course object

public function duplicateCourseAction(Request $request) {
    if ($this         


        

Answer 1

Trick here is that you must unset duplicate entity id. Otherwise breaks the logic of the doctrine. Doctrine has some known limitations. Also check this question, its very similar.

Answer 2

You can control what exactly gets cloned by overriding the __clone() method in your Course entity. You can set id to null and clone referenced objects if you need a deep copy.

The serialization/unserialization feels like a hack, so I recommend against using it.