How to have doctrine dbal in symfony?

Question

For some reasons I don't want my users to edit /app/config/config.php to add the database credentials, but in a separate file they add them as an array and my /app/config/config.php is PHP, not YAML nor XML, so how can I tell /app/config/config.php to get database credentials as an array from another file?

I did look at an application that works like that and I see they use:

$container->loadFromExtension('doctrine', array(
 'orm' => array(
  'auto_generate_proxy_classes' => false,
  'default_entity_manager' => 'default',
  'entity_managers' => array(
   'default' => array('mappings' => array('MyApp' => array('type' => 'staticphp')), 'class_metadata_factory_name' => 'Doctrine\\ORM\\Mapping\\StaticClassMetadataFactory')
  )
 ),
 'dbal' => array(
  'default_connection' => 'default',
  'connections' => array(
   'default' => array('host' => 'from_user_config.db', 'logging' => true),
   'read' => array('host' => 'from_user_config.db_read', 'logging' => true)
  )
 )
));

Since it is not documented, I appreciate if you clarify how can I do this the way I described?

Answer 1

Though it's explained in the article provided by Qoop, I must admit that the explanation is a bit vague so I'm going to elaborate in case it helps you.

First off, in your app/config/config.php include the following line.

// app/config/config.php
$loader->import('my_custom_parameters.php');

create the file my_custom_parameters.php (documentation's example, I'll provide mine later on).

// app/config/my_custom_parameters.php
include_once('/path/to/drupal/sites/default/settings.php');
$container->setParameter('drupal.database.url', $db_url);

In the documentation's example there's another import in case you want your settings to be stored somewhere else. It's not mandatory to do so and you can include the variables directly in parameters.php if you like.

For simplicity, I'm going to get rid of the include_once and I'm going to modify the credentials directly.

// app/config/my_custom_parameters.php
$container->setParameter('database_name', 'the_db_I_want');
$container->setParameter('database_user', 'the_user_I_want');
$container->setParameter('database_password', 'the_pass_I_want');

As you can see, you can override as many parameters as you want.

UPDATE

You can also try this (haven't tested but think will work):

// app/config/my_custom_parameters.php
include_once('/path/to/where/people/can/modify/settings.php');
$container->loadFromExtension('doctrine', array(
 'orm' => array(
  'auto_generate_proxy_classes' => $variable_from_settings_php,
  'default_entity_manager' => $another_variable_from_settins_php,
  'entity_managers' => array(
   'default' => array('mappings' => array('MyApp' => array('type' => 'staticphp')), 'class_metadata_factory_name' => 'Doctrine\\ORM\\Mapping\\StaticClassMetadataFactory')
  )
 ),
 'dbal' => array(
  'default_connection' => 'default',
  'connections' => array(
   'default' => array('host' => 'from_user_config.db', 'logging' => true),
   'read' => array('host' => 'from_user_config.db_read', 'logging' => true)
  )
 )

I'm using the code you provided. You can use the configuration you like. I've added some dummy variables that could be loaded from the file imported as parameter values just to show you that, in theory, you could do something similar.

As you can read in the documentation (the part talking about setting up the bd, 'Configuring the Database' is called):

Defining the configuration via parameters.yml is just a convention. The parameters defined in that file are referenced by the main configuration file when setting up Doctrine

Give it a try and let me know if it works.

Hope it's clearer.