CODEWITHSUNDEEP
symfonydoctrine
Alejandro Pérez
Alejandro Pérez

Reputation: 2637

Symfony 2: filtering x-to-many relations

I have two entities that represent users (User) and friendship requests (FriendshipRequest). There is a oneToMany relationship between User and FriendshipRequest, so Doctrine creates a method that is called getFriendshipRequests() in the class User. This is ok, but FriendshipRequest has an attribute that is called status, so I would like that the User class could filter the friendship requests associated to it attending to their status. I have read Doctrine documentation, and I found out this:

Natively you can’t filter associations in 2.0 and 2.1. You should use DQL queries to query for the filtered set of entities.

According to this, I suppose that I should create a FriendshipRequest repository and create a method called "findByStatusAndUser" (or something like that), but I think that's a crappy solution.

I would like to have a method in the User entity, like getPendingStatusRequests(). Is this possible? If it isn't, what would be the best solution?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2921

Answers (3)

Teo.sk
Teo.sk

Reputation: 2627

As of Doctrine 2.3 you can use matching and Criteria.
Then you could use getPendingStatusRequests() in User entity just like you wanted. For your example the code would look like this:

public function getPendingStatusRequests()
{
    $criteria = Criteria::create(); //don't forget to use Doctrine\Common\Collections\Criteria;
    $criteria->where(Criteria::expr()->eq('status', 1));

    return $this->friendshipRequests->matching($criteria);
}

Upvotes: 2

Cerad
Cerad

Reputation: 48893

You can certainly add getPendingStatusRequests() to user and then have it cycle through all the friendship requests and only return those with the appropriate status.

The only potential problem is that all of the friendship requests will always be loaded including those you don't need. It is up to you to decide if this is a real problem or not. It might be that once a friendship request is processed then it is removed so a user won't have many requests at any given time.

If you do want to avoid loading all the requests then make a query and use the WITH expression on your join clause. Something like:

$qb->leftJoin('user.friendshipRequests','request', 
        Expr\Join::WITH, $qb->expr()->eq('request.status', $qb->expr()->literal('Pending')));

And since you are using S2 I would not fool around with repositories. Just make a service called UserManager, inject the entity manager, and give it a method called loadUserWithPendingFriendshipRequests.

Upvotes: 0

dmirkitanov
dmirkitanov

Reputation: 1396

I think that "getPendingRequestsForUser($user)" method in the FriendshipRequest repository should be a good solution. Inside this method you just need to create an appropriate DQL.

This is a good solution, because all of the logic should be moved to repositories, leaving entities as small and clean as possible.

UPD: Also, you could use findBy method, as described here, ex:

$pendingRequests = $em->getRepository('MyBundle:FriendshipRequest')->findBy(
    array('user' => $user->getId(), 'status' => 1)
);

But for me, first method is preferred.

Upvotes: 1

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