Symfony 2 - How to set relationship between three entities having many to many relationship among them

Question

I am using Symfony2 for my application and using Doctrine .orm.yml files for relation mapping.

I have three entities as follows:

1. user entity which contains id(integer primary key), user_name(varchar)

2. portfolio entity which contains id(integer primary key), name(varchar), user_id (FK from user to identify who created the portfolio)

3. progress entity which contains id(integer primary key), progress_text(varchar)

My problem is that I am not aware how to set the many to many relationship among three entities i.e. Portfolio, User and Progress.

I want to set a relationship in a way such that the new table that gets created as a result of this relationship contains the below fields:

1. user_id
2. portfolio_id
3. progress_id
4. created_at
5. updated_at
6. type

In the above list created_at, updated_at and type are the fields that I am using for some business rules purpose.

Please some body help me in writing their .orm.yml files. I understand that there are inbuilt commands in Symfony2 that generates entity and their corresponding .orm.yml files. But I am not aware how to write the above required relation in their corresponding file.

Answer 1

You need to create separate association table for this relationship. Your ORM file will be like:

Application\Bundle\Entity\nameofAssociationTable:
  type: entity
  table: nameofAssociationTable
  fields:
    id:
      type: integer
      id: true
      generator:
        strategy: AUTO
  manyToOne:
user:
      targetEntity: Application\Bundle\Entity\User
      cascade: {  }
      mappedBy: null
      inversedBy: null
      joinColumns:
        user_id:
          referencedColumnName: id
      orphanRemoval: false
portfolio:
      targetEntity: Application\PLibBundle\Entity\Portfolio
      cascade:
        - persist
        - remove
      mappedBy: null
      inversedBy: null
      joinColumns:
        portfolio_id:
          referencedColumnName: id
      orphanRemoval: false
  lifecycleCallbacks: {  }
 

Likewise you need add relation into manytoOne relationship. Thanks.