How to achieve REPLACE INTO in doctrine2 - doctrine-orm

Question

I am refactoring a code base, because this is a legacy code with a lot of raw sql, and the whole thing is spaghetti code.
I am sadly facing that doctrine has no REPLACE INTO functionality, I know the reasons why.
I found some workaround, like merge but that is deprecated.
I spend a lot of hours to learn doctrine, because it is widely used ORM, and a lot of hours while I built the entities.
Is there any "legal" solution to achieve this REPLACE INTO?

Answer 1

You can handle duplicates by catching UniqueConstraintViolationException.
$entity = new PossibleDuplicatedEntity();
try {
$em->persist($entity);
$em->flush();
}
catch (\Doctrine\DBAL\Exception\UniqueConstraintViolationException $e) {
// handle duplicated values
}
But beware – Doctrine uses implicit transaction. When exception is thrown, transaction is rolled-back and EntityManager is closed (entities are detached). See documentation.
Better would be handling cause of duplication occurring. I.e. if it's because of concurrency, try to use table locking etc.

Answer 2

If you just want to 'upsert' rows into the database and you don't care about change tracking you could use the piece of code below. It's probably more performant than relying on UniqueConstraintViolationException's.
I use it for batch-uploading rows into a table.
/**
* #throws Exception
*/
public static function replaceInto(EntityManagerInterface $em, iterable $entities): void
{
$i = 0;
$values = [];
$metadata = $fieldNames = $sql = null;
foreach ($entities as $entity) {
if (!isset($metadata)) {
$metadata = $em->getClassMetadata(get_class($entity));
$fieldNames = $metadata->getFieldNames();
$tableName = $metadata->getTableName();
$sql = "REPLACE INTO `$tableName` VALUES ";
}
$params = [];
foreach ($fieldNames as $fieldName) {
$paramName = ':' . $metadata->getColumnName($fieldName) . '_' . $i;
$params[] = $paramName;
$values[] = [$paramName, $metadata->getFieldValue($entity, $fieldName), $metadata->getTypeOfField($fieldName)];
}
if ($i > 0) {
$sql .= ",";
}
$sql .= "\n(" . join(', ', $params) . ")";
$i++;
}
$stmt = $em->getConnection()->prepare($sql);
foreach ($values as $value) {
$stmt->bindValue(...$value);
}
$stmt->executeQuery();
}