Doctrine and ZF2: Store ManyToOne relation without cascading - doctrine-orm

Question

I´m struggling with setting up the entities correctly at the moment.
Here´s the situation:
"Country" has one or many "Customers"
I´ve a country table with all countries and I want to save a reference to a country with each customer. Quite simple and often required.
But I´m unable to configure the entities properly. If I don´t define a cascading method in the "Customer" class, I get an exception. If I add a cascading method then the country objects are added as a new record also to the country table but I only want to have a reference to this object in the Customer table.
Customer Class
/**
* #ORM\Entity
* #ORM\Table(name="PS_Customer")
*/
class Customer {
/**
* #ORM\Id
* #ORM\GeneratedValue(strategy="AUTO")
* #ORM\Column(type="integer")
*/
protected $id;
/**
* #ORM\ManyToOne(targetEntity="Country",inversedBy="id")
* #ORM\JoinColumn(name="country_id", referencedColumnName="id")
*/
protected $country;
}
Country Class
/**
* #ORM\Entity
* #ORM\Table(name="PS_Country")
*/
class Country {
/**
* #ORM\Id
* #ORM\GeneratedValue(strategy="AUTO")
* #ORM\Column(type="integer")
* #ORM\OneToMany(targetEntity="Customer", mappedBy="country")
*/
protected $id;
/** #ORM\Column(type="string") */
protected $name;
/** #ORM\Column(type="string") */
protected $iso2;
}
If I want to store a Customer object with this definition, I receive the following error:
A new entity was found through the relationship 'Photoshop\Entity\Customer#country' that was not configured to cascade persist operations for entity: Photoshop\Entity\Country#000000004c6f8efb00000000b695d273. To solve this issue: Either explicitly call EntityManager#persist() on this unknown entity or configure cascade persist this association in the mapping for example #ManyToOne(..,cascade={"persist"}). If you cannot find out which entity causes the problem implement 'Photoshop\Entity\Country#__toString()' to get a clue.
ActionController (extracted):
$forms = $this->getServiceLocator()->get('FormElementManager');
$form = $forms->get('Photoshop\Form\CheckoutForm');
$customer = new Customer;
$form->bind($customer);
$order = new Order;
$order->setCustomer($customer);
// Order object is put into a session during checkout process here...
/**
* Commit Order to database
*/
$em = $this->getServiceLocator()->get('Doctrine\ORM\EntityManager');
$em->persist($sessionCheckout->order); // Fetch the order object from session
$em->flush();
Checkout Form
class CheckoutForm extends Form implements ObjectManagerAwareInterface {
protected $objectManager;
public function __construct() {
parent::__construct('checkout');
}
public function init() {
$this->setAttribute('action', 'checkout');
$this->setAttribute('method', 'post');
$this->setHydrator(new DoctrineHydrator($this->getObjectManager()));
$this->setInputFilter(new \Photoshop\Form\CheckoutFilter());
$this->add(array(
'name' => 'country',
'type' => 'DoctrineModule\Form\Element\ObjectSelect',
'options' => array(
'label' => 'Country:',
'empty_option' => 'Please choose...',
'object_manager' => $this->getObjectManager(),
'target_class' => 'Photoshop\Entity\Country',
'property' => 'name',
),
));
$this->add(array(
'type' => 'Zend\Form\Element\Select',
'name' => 'gender',
'options' => array(
'label' => 'Title*:',
'empty_option' => 'Please choose...',
'value_options' => array(
'f' => 'Mrs.',
'm' => 'Mr.'
),
)
));
$this->add(array(
'name' => 'firstName',
'attributes' => array(
'type' => 'text',
'id' => 'firstName'
),
'options' => array(
'label' => 'First name*:'
),
));
$this->add(array(
'name' => 'lastName',
'attributes' => array(
'type' => 'text',
'id' => 'lastName'
),
'options' => array(
'label' => 'Last name*:'
),
));
$this->add(array(
'name' => 'submit',
'attributes' => array(
'type' => 'submit',
'value' => 'Pay with PayPal or Credit Card now',
'class' => 'btn btn-primary btn-lg btn-block'
)
));
}
public function setObjectManager(ObjectManager $objectManager) {
$this->objectManager = $objectManager;
}
/**
* Get the object manager
*
* #return ObjectManager
*/
public function getObjectManager() {
return $this->objectManager;
}
}
I´m quite sure that it will be simple to solve. But I can´t see the solution at the moment :)
Maybe somebody can give me a hint?!? Would appreciate that...
Thanks,
Michael

Answer 1

// Order object is put into a session during checkout process here... ---- thats the important part
So if I understand, you create order and customer in one request, then transfer it through session to some other request and persist it there. What really happens is that you have object graph like order->customer->country, where first two are new entities, so serializing unserializing does nothing wrong with them, but country is managed entity already existing in DB. By serializing it into session it is detached from entity manager and after unserializing it, it is presented to new entity manager instance, which does not know that it was once managed, so decides to persist is as new one.
Usually you need to merge unserialized entity to current entity manager
$managedOrder = $em->merge($sessionCheckout->order);
and work with $managedOrder. For this to work you might need to set cascade={"merge"} on Customer::country and on Order::customer.
Doctrine has Entities in session documentation page on this subject.