Doctrine and Multiple Entity associations

Question

Using Doctrine 2 and Symfony here. I'm fairly new to Doctrine and can't find what I'm looking for in their docs, so I'm looking for some guidance on a situation.

I have these entities: 1. Profile (profile of a person, a person can have many addresses) 2. School (school info, a school can have many addresses) 3. Address (all addresses, associated to one of the above entities)

Previously, I had Profile, ProfileAddress, School, SchoolAddress, which worked fine, but I'd rather have a single class/table to make address updates to because I may get other entities down the road which also need addresses. Also, if my address format changes, I just want to change ONE class/table instead of many.

My question is this... Is it possible to associated two (or more) different entities to a single entity? Here is an example of the data I would EXPECT to see in the actual tables.

-Profiles-

|id|fname |lname|
| 1|John  |Smith|
| 2|Jane  |Jones|

-Schools-

|id|name             |type             |
| 1|City College     |University       |
| 2|Greendale        |Community College|

-Addresses-

|id|src_id|src     |type    |address1          |address2|
| 1|     1|profiles|maling  |PO BOX 555        |        |
| 2|     1|profiles|physical|123 W. Main St.   |Apt A   |
| 3|     1|schools |physical|541 University Way|        |
| 4|     2|schools |physical|111 Winger Ave    |        |

Is this possible with Doctrine? If so HOW? Or is there a better way I could design this? What have others done in this situation?

There are benefits to having the reference table: Doctrine will assume it if the entities matched in it are properly configured. Entities are properly persisted. So no entity for the reference table needs to be created. Easy as pie. — geoB, Jan 30 '14 at 04:22

Derick F · Answer 1 · 2014-01-30T23:10:04.630

It's quite possible, you just need 2 mapping tables, so instead of having a source column in addresses, you would have a profile_address and school_address tables. You would need to specify unidirectional (one way) going from profile to address and school to address.

Edit:

in the standard example of giving a user roles you would have:

/**
 * @ORM\ManyToMany(targetEntity="Role")
 * @ORM\JoinTable(name="user_role",
 *     joinColumns={@ORM\JoinColumn(name="user_id", referencedColumnName="id")},
 *     inverseJoinColumns={@ORM\JoinColumn(name="role_id", referencedColumnName="id")}
 * )
 */
protected $roles;

now lets say you wanted to have another object, let's say bystander that you wanted to have roles for as well, you would have:

/**
 * @ORM\ManyToMany(targetEntity="Role")
 * @ORM\JoinTable(name="bystander_role",
 *     joinColumns={@ORM\JoinColumn(name="bystander_id", referencedColumnName="id")},
 *     inverseJoinColumns={@ORM\JoinColumn(name="role_id", referencedColumnName="id")}
 * )
 */
protected $roles;

that's all there is to it.

Thats good to know its possible. My question is HOW? I haven't found anything in the documentation, but maybe I'm looking in the wrong spot. Any examples or documentation you know of? — Bob, Jan 30 '14 at 17:14

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 30 '14 at 17:29

Looks like I just didn't know the correct words to use. I found the documentation for Doctrine's MappedSuperClass and/or single table inheritance which has what I need.

Documentation here: http://docs.doctrine-project.org/en/latest/reference/inheritance-mapping.html

Doctrine and Multiple Entity associations

2 Answers2