Symfony 2.7 findOneBy() Function Finds the Wrong Entity

Question

I've got a controller action that's supposed to be looking for semi-duplicate entries in a collection, and removing them from that Entity's list. New ones should not have an ID yet, and existing ones do, so I'm running findOneBy() with an array of parameters to match on (leaving out ID).

I am baffled and deeply troubled by the error I am getting, where it finds the wrong entity! I've got some relevant code below, I hope this is just a dream or a silly mistake, I can't reproduce the output on my own windows development environment, but my co-worker was testing on his mac, and was getting errors, so I went on his machine and did some quick echoing to see what was going on. See the code and the result below.

CODE

foreach($entity->getTechnicians() as $tech) {
  //find new addtions, see if they exist
  if (!$tech->getId()) {
    echo "Technician " . $tech->getFirstName() . " has no ID, trying to find one that does<br/>";
    $found = $em->getRepository('TechnicianBundle:Technician')->findOneBy(array(
      'firstName' => $tech->getFirstName(),
      'lastName' => $tech->getLastName(),
      'email' => $tech->getEmail(),
      'residentEngineer' => $tech->getResidentEngineer(),
      'officeNumber' => $tech->getOfficeNumber()
    ));

    //if one with an ID already exists
    if ($found) {
      echo "found technician " . $found->getFirstName() . " that already has id " . $found->getId() . "<br/>";
     ...

OUTPUT

Technician Four has no ID, trying to find one that does
found technician khjvuov that already has id 7

Answer 1

Probably it's not a findOneBy() issue.

If without add/remove calls it works, it may be caused by modified current pointer of ArrayCollection so when $tech->getFirstName() is called it actually points to another entry.

You may try to iterate your collection like this:

$iterator = $entity->getTechnicians()->getIterator();
while ($iterator->valid()) {
  $tech = $iterator->current();

  ... $entity->addTechnician()/$entity->removeTechnician()

  $iterator->next();
}

It will create new ArrayIterator object, so you can modify underlying object preserving ArrayCollection's internal pointer.

This may be obsolete if you are running PHP7 (reference - Note box)