Create Entity

Creating an Entity Class

Suppose you´re building an application where products with three properties id, title and price need to be created as a Product object. This class has to be in the directory src/Entity and the namespace is App\Entity;

At this point, our object class looks like:

<?php
// src/Entity/Product.php

namespace App\Entity;

use Sylius\Component\Resource\Model\ResourceInterface;

class Product implements ResourceInterface
{
    protected $id;

    public function getId()
    {
        return $this->id;
    }
}

As you can see, this class also implements a interface called ResourceInterface . Why we do that, will be explained later, but it has to be mentioned now, because it is the reason, why our Product class needs the id property. This id will be used as our primary key in our database table and the getId()-Function is the only function we need, to include this interface.

For the other two properties, we also need a variable and as common in classes, each of them has its own public getter and setter methods.

To define the database type of the variables, we use annotations. Our id as primary key has to be unique, the best datatype is an integer. The title of a product is usually a word, so we mark the title as string. The price can be an integer, because we can save 1.78 USD as 178¢.

If we want to save an entity in a database-table, we need a column for each class-property we want to save. For our example the columns would be id, title and price. To create and map them we will use one more time annotations. In that case, they start with @ORM\...

Let's take a look at our code:

<?php
// src/Entity/Product.php

namespace App\Entity;

use Sylius\Component\Resource\Model\ResourceInterface;
use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;

/**
 * @ORM\Entity(repositoryClass="App\Repository\ProductRepository")
 * @ORM\Table(name="app_product")
 */
class Product implements ResourceInterface
{
    /**
     * @var integer
     * @ORM\Id
     * @ORM\GeneratedValue(strategy="AUTO")
     * @ORM\Column(type="integer")
     */
    private $id;

    /**
     * @var string
     * @ORM\Column(type="string", length=255, nullable=true)
     */
    private $title;

    /**
     * @var float
     * @ORM\Column(type="integer", nullable=true)
     */
    private $price;


    /**
    * @return int
    */
    public function getId()
    {
        return $this->id;
    }

    /**
    * @return string
    */
    public function getTitle()
    {
        return $this->title;
    }

    /**
     * Set title
     * @param string $title
     * @return Product
     */
    public function setTitle($title)
    {
        $this->title = $title;
        return $this;
    }

    /**
     * @return int
     */
    public function getPrice()
    {
        return $this->price;
    }

    /**
     * Set price
     * @param integer $price
     * @return Product
     */
    public function setPrice($price)
    {
        $this->price = $price;
        return $this;
    }
}

We´ve already talked about the annotations for our attributes. We can also use PHP-annotations for functions, as you can see in our example. For more information about annotations, take a look at this documentation.

Or for the doctrine annotations, have a look at the doctrine annotation reference

An optional, but important annotation is @ORM\Table, which defines the table name for this entity. A good structured and well-named database is always a goal which should be sought.

One step is mapping all properties of the entity to columns in the table. We can do this with @ORM\Column(type="integer"). Other common datatypes are string, float, boolean etc. You can find a full list and way more about basic mapping in doctrine here.

Another option for the column is, if the value in the column can be NULL or not. We define that with nullable=true/false (the default value is false).

The id needs some special annotations, for example @ORM\Id, which mark this property as primary key in a table and @ORM\GeneratedValue(strategy="AUTO") specifies which strategy is used for identifier generation for an instance variable which is annotated by id.

At this page, a reference of all Doctrine annotations is given with short explanations on their context and usage.

Awesome! We´ve just created our first PHP-class, which is also called Entity in Symfony.

Creating an Repository Class

Our next step is, how we can easily save our entity in our database, with the powerful Doctrine ORM, which helps us to manage our database and synchronize it with our project.

Before we mark our entity class with @ORM\Entity and define the repositoryClass, which we will need for more complex database queries, in order to isolate, reuse and test these queries, it's a good practice to create this custom repository class for your entity.

The common path for the Repository-classes are src/Repository.

<?php
// src/Repository/ProductRepository

namespace App\Repository;

use Enhavo\Bundle\AppBundle\Repository\EntityRepository;

class ProductRepository extends EntityRepository
{

}

An empty Repository is very unspectacular, but we will learn how useful they can be later.

Update Database

After this, we have a useable Product class with all important information for Doctrine to create the product table. But after all, we still have no table in our database, but creating it is very comfortable now, just run:

$ php bin/console doctrine:schema:update --force

It seems to be nothing special, but this command does a lot! It checks, how your database should look like (based on the mapping information we´ve defined with the annotations in our product class before) and compares it with how the database actually looks like. Only the differences will be executed as SQL statements to update the database.

Well-intentioned Advices

An even better way to synchronize your database with the mapping information from your project is via migrations, which are as powerful as the schema:update command. In addition, changes to your database schema are safely and reliably tracked and reversible.

Even it is quite powerful, the doctrine:schema:update command should only be used during development.

WARNING

It should never be used in a production environment with important information in your database.

You can also create or update an entity with the command:

$ php bin/console make:entity

which will ask you everything you need to create or update an entity. You will find a good explanation in the Symfony Docs , but for the first time, we recommend to create your classes without this command, to understand how they work.