Doctrine: how to set referenceOne relationship without finding() the referenced document? - doctrine-orm

we need to create a document which references one document in another collection. We know the id of the document being referenced and that's all we need to know.
our first approach is:
$referencedDocument=$repository->find($referencedId);
$newDocument->setUser($referencedDocument);
now the question is if we can do it somehow without the first line (and hitting the database). In the db (we use Mongo) reference is just an integer field and we know that target id, so finding() the $referencedDocument seems redundant.
We tried to create new User with just an id set, but that gets us an error during persisting.
Thanks!

In one of projects I used something like this:
$categoryReference = $this->getEntityManager()->getReference(ProjectCategory::class, $category['id']);
Thou, if you use Mongo, you probably need to use getDocumentManager()
So, link to doctrine docs. mongo odm 1.0.

Related

How to find out whether default value is used for Datastore ndb property?

Let's say we have a model like this:
class UserConfig(ndb.Model):
name = ndb.StringProperty()
email_subscriber = ndb.BooleanProperty(default=True)
Let's assume email_subscriber was set to default True by mistake and we want to fix that mistake and use default=False instead. I tried changing the value to default=False and that works fine for users created after that code is deployed, but that doesn't fix the problem for existing users.
Is there a way (e.g. some internal property which isn't documented in Datastore documentation), which would provide info whether given prop value was set explicitly by user or using the provided default.
I can write an upgrade which would set email_subscriber=False for all users, but I'm afraid some users might have intentionally checked this property in the app and wouldn't like to break their experience.
tl;dr: How can I determine if value in ndb object was set using the default for that property or was provided explicitly.
There is no way to know this. Once a value is set in the database there is no way to know which part of your code (ndb runs in your code from the database perspective) set the value.

Doctrine specify logical name for JoinColumn [duplicate]

I'm working on an events site and have a one to many relationship between a production and its performances, when I have a performance object if I need its production id at the moment I have to do
$productionId = $performance->getProduction()->getId();
In cases when I literally just need the production id it seems like a waste to send off another database query to get a value that's already in the object somewhere.
Is there a way round this?
Edit 2013.02.17:
What I wrote below is no longer true. You don't have to do anything in the scenario outlined in the question, because Doctrine is clever enough to load the id fields into related entities, so the proxy objects will already contain the id, and it will not issue another call to the database.
Outdated answer below:
It is possible, but it is unadvised.
The reason behind that, is Doctrine tries to truly adhere to the principle that your entities should form an object graph, where the foreign keys have no place, because they are just "artifacts", that come from the way relational databases work.
You should rewrite the association to be
eager loaded, if you always need the related entity
write a DQL query (preferably on a Repository) to fetch-join the related entity
let it lazy-load the related entity by calling a getter on it
If you are not convinced, and really want to avoid all of the above, there are two ways (that I know of), to get the id of a related object, without triggering a load, and without resorting to tricks like reflection and serialization:
If you already have the object in hand, you can retrieve the inner UnitOfWork object that Doctrine uses internally, and use it's getEntityIdentifier() method, passing it the unloaded entity (the proxy object). It will return you the id, without triggering the lazy-load.
Assuming you have many-to-one relation, with multiple articles belonging to a category:
$articleId = 1;
$article = $em->find('Article', $articleId);
$categoryId = $em->getUnitOfWork()->getEntityIdentifier($article->getCategory());
Coming 2.2, you will be able to use the IDENTITY DQL function, to select just a foreign key, like this:
SELECT IDENTITY(u.Group) AS group_id FROM User u WHERE u.id = ?0
It is already committed to the development versions.
Still, you should really try to stick to one of the "correct" methods.

Can a Custom DataProvider class expose Custom Templates?

I am currently in the process of writing a custom DataProvider. Using the Intergrate External Data documentation.
I've managed to show the external data in the Sitecore back end. However whenever I try to view the data in the items I created, I am getting an error
Null ids are not allowed. <br> Parameter name: displayName
There seems to be precious little on the subject on how to create a custom DataProvider on the Sitecore Developer Network.
The example on their website seems to only show how to import a SINGLE item into a static database. However I am simply trying to merge some items into the hierarchy and I can't find any useful documentation.
It seems that one of your methods that should return an ID doesn't. It might be GetChildIds and/or GetParentId.
Nick Wesselman wrote a good article about it gathering all the information including an example on the Marketplace. I think that is your best start. You can read it here.
Turns out I needed to include at the very least, the Fields->Section->Template in the GetParent method. To be on the safe side I included the Fields/Sections/Templates into my implementations of
GetChildIDs
GetItemDefinition
GetParentID
It wasn't obvious that this was the case, since I had in fact implemented the GetTemplates method correctly, and I had expected that should be enough.

RESTful API and Foreign key handling for POSTs and PUTs

I'm helping develop a new API for an existing database.
I'm using Python 2.7.3, Django 1.5 and the django-rest-framework 2.2.4 with PostgreSQL 9.1
I need/want good documentation for the API, but I'm shorthanded and I hate writing/maintaining documentation (one of my many flaws).
I need to allow consumers of the API to add new "POS" (points of sale) locations. In the Postgres database, there is a foreign key from pos to pos_location_type. So, here is a simplified table structure.
pos_location_type(
id serial,
description text not null
);
pos(
id serial,
pos_name text not null,
pos_location_type_id int not null references pos_location_type(id)
);
So, to allow them to POST a new pos, they will need to give me a "pos_name" an a valid pos_location_type. So, I've been reading about this stuff all weekend. Lots of debates out there.
How is my API consumers going to know what a pos_location_type is? Or what value to pass here?
It seems like I need to tell them where to get a valid list of pos_locations. Something like:
GET /pos_location/
As a quick note, examples of pos_location_type descriptions might be: ('school', 'park', 'office').
I really like the "Browseability" of of the Django REST Framework, but, it doesn't seem to address this type of thing, and I actually had a very nice chat on IRC with Tom Christie earlier today, and he didn't really have an answer on what to do here (or maybe I never made my question clear).
I've looked at Swagger, and that's a very cool/interesting project, but take a look at their "pet" resource on their demo here. Notice it is pretty similar to what I need to do. To add a new pet, you need to pass a category, which they define as class Category(id: long, name: string). How is the consumer suppose to know what to pass here? What's a valid id? or name?
In Django rest framework, I can define/override what is returned in the OPTION call. I guess I could come up with my own little "system" here and return some information like:
pos-location-url: '/pos_location/'
in the generic form, it would be: {resource}-url: '/path/to/resource_list'
and that would sort of work for the documentation side, but I'm not sure if that's really a nice solution programmatically. What if I change the resources location. That would mean that my consumers would need to programmatically make and OPTIONS call for the resource to figure out all of the relations. Maybe not a bad thing, but feels like a little weird.
So, how do people handle this kind of thing?
Final notes: I get the fact that I don't really want a "leaking" abstaction here and have my database peaking thru the API layer, but the fact remains that there is a foreign_key constraint on this existing database and any insert that doesn't have a valid pos_location_type_id is raising an error.
Also, I'm not trying to open up the URI vs. ID debate. Whether the user has to use the pos_location_type_id int value or a URI doesn't matter for this discussion. In either case, they have no idea what to send me.
I've worked with this kind of stuff in the past. I think there is two ways of approaching this problem, the first you already said it, allow an endpoint for users of the API to know what is the id-like value of the pos_location_type. Many API's do this because a person developing from your API is gonna have to read your documentation and will know where to get the pos_location_type values from. End-users should not worry about this, because they will have an interface showing probably a dropdown list of text values.
On the other hand, the way I've also worked this, not very RESTful-like. Let's suppose you have a location in New York, and the POST could be something like:
POST /pos/new_york/
You can handle /pos/(location_name)/ by normalizing the text, then just search on the database for the value or some similarity, if place does not exist then you just create a new one. That in case users can add new places, if not, then the user would have to know what fixed places exist, which again is the first situation we are in.
that way you can avoid pos_location_type in the request data, you could programatically map it to a valid ID.

SOAP - Why do I need to query for the original values for an update?

I'm taking over a project and wanted to understand if this is common practice using SOAP. The process that is currently in place I have to query all the values before I do an update cause I need to pass back all the values that are not being updated. Does this sound right?
Example Values:
fname=phill
lname=pafford
address=123 main
phone:222-555-1212
So if I just wanted to update the phone number I need to query for the record, get all the values and submit these values for an update.
Example Update Values:
fname=phill
lname=pafford
address=123 main
phone:111-555-1212
I just want to know if this is common practice or should I change the functionality of this?
This is not specific to SOAP. It may simply be how the service is designed. In general, there will be fields that can only be updated if you have the original value: you can't add one to a field unless you know the original value, for instance. The service seems to have been designed for the general case.
I don't think that it is a very "common" practice. However I've seen cases where the old values are posted together with the new values, in order to validate that noone else has updated the values in the meantime.