I am looking to create a property on an entity that will primarily be use to hold count. Example:
Brand
- id
- name
- numberOfProducts
The numberOfProducts property is nothing more than a count of products. However, this count changes depending on how i look at the product. For instance, maybe i only want the count of active products for that brand vs the count of all products for that brand.
nHibernate has something similar, see: Query Unmapped Columns in NHibernate
Is this possible? Or is there a better way of solving my problem? I could of course add 2 count properties for each situation then add a denormalized field but this is a lot of work for a case that is more or less a one time use.
I could also simply create to grab all brands as well as the count query all in one DQL statement, however this would mean i have to manually map the counted field into the property. I was hoping doctrine could just do that mapping for me.
I think the best solution here would be to create custom hydrators, that are able to set extra (non managed fields) into entity properties: