I'm a bit of a symfony novice, and I'm attempting to create a system to track revisions to manufacturing specifications. I am using symfony 1.4.9 with Doctrine.
I have a one to many relationship between Specifications and Revisions. When creating a new Specification, an initial "Revision" must also be created, which holds most of the relevant data. In other words, I need to be able to create both a Specification and a connected Revision simultaneously.
I have created forms for Specifications and for Revisions. I am able to use the forms individually, and they function as expected. The forms render properly when embedded, and validate as expected. Creating a new Revision for an existing Specification works fine. My problem comes when I try to create a new Specification and its required Revision.
Revision's foreign key is Specification's primary key. That primary key does not exist until the Specification record is added to the database. The embedded form save fails with a MySQL error because the Revision's foreign key field cannot be null.
What is the best way around this? My thought is to change the schema to allow the foreign key to be null. I'll be able to save the forms, then do a query based on the form's values to determine what the new Specification's primary key got set to, THEN I should be able to set the related Revision's foreign key to that value. This seems ridiculously convoluted though, and will result in two extra queries than what it seems should really be required.
The easy way I can think to do it is to stop trying to use the embedded form functionality and switch to doing this in two steps (create and save the specification, then create and save the related revision) - however, my client does not want this, so it is not an option.
I'm really hoping that I'm missing something in the framework and that there's an easier way around this. Any ideas?
Edit:
These tables are both part of a larger system, so the schema is complex. A simplified version of each with irrelevant sections removed and renamed as appropriate:
Specifications:
connection: doctrine
tableName: specifications
columns:
specification_id:
type: integer(4)
fixed: false
unsigned: false
primary: true
autoincrement: true
specification_name:
type: string(10)
fixed: false
unsigned: false
primary: false
notnull: true
autoincrement: false
relations:
Revisions:
local: specification_id
foreign: specification_id
type: many
Revisions:
connection: doctrine
tableName: revisions
columns:
revision_id:
type: integer(4)
fixed: false
unsigned: false
primary: true
autoincrement: true
specification_id:
type: integer(4)
fixed: false
unsigned: false
primary: false
notnull: true
autoincrement: false
revision_is_current:
type: integer(1)
fixed: false
unsigned: false
primary: false
notnull: true
autoincrement: false
revision_effective_date:
type: date(25)
fixed: false
unsigned: false
primary: false
notnull: true
autoincrement: false
revision_name:
type: string(20)
fixed: false
unsigned: false
primary: false
notnull: true
autoincrement: false
revision_deactivated_date:
type: date(25)
fixed: false
unsigned: false
primary: false
notnull: false
autoincrement: false
revision_filename:
type: string(40)
fixed: false
unsigned: false
primary: false
notnull: true
autoincrement: false
relations:
Specifications:
local: specification_id
foreign: specification_id
type: one
RevisionsForm is embedded into SpecificationsForm via this command in SpecificationsForm.class.php:
$newRevision = new RevisionsForm();
$this->embedForm('Revision', $newRevision;
I can easily make the whole thing work when the specification_id already exists, but I don't see a way to do it until $form->save() is called for the parent SpecificationsForm. I feel like I'm missing something very obvious, but the symfony documentation is very sparse on embedded forms.
If no other solution presents itself, Versionable looks like it will do the job (albeit with a lot of repeated data).
