Virtual (generated) columns in Doctrine

Question

I was wondering if there was still no way to work with fake or generated (virtual?) properties in Doctrine?

I take an old example: a Person entity with a firstname and a lastname (based on a table with these two fields only).

Is it possible to create a virtual property fullName which would not be linked to any column in the table and which could be accessible without calling a handmade getFullName?

I obviously don't want to have to do it myself with the QueryBuilder.

/**
* @ORM\Column(name="LASTNAME", type="string", length=100, nullable=true)
*/
private $lastname;
    
/**
* @ORM\Column(name="FIRSTNAME", type="string", length=100, nullable=true)
*/
private $firstname;
    
/**
* @ORM\Column(type="string")
*/
private string $fullName = "";
    
public function __construct()
{
    $this->fullName = $this->firstname . " " . $this->firstname;
}

Answer 1

I just came across this question on a slightly different subject... but it includes the solution to my issue.

It's actually enough to add an @ORM\HasLifecycleCallbacks on the Person entity and add an @ORM\PostLoad() on the virtual property (unmapped) init function.

Here is the final working solution:

/**
 * Person
 *
 * @ORM\Entity
 * @ORM\HasLifecycleCallbacks
 */
class Person
{

    /**
     * @ORM\Column(name="LASTNAME", type="string")
     */
    private $lastname;

    /**
     * @ORM\Column(name="FIRSTNAME", type="string")
     */
    private $firstname;

    //Non mapped property
    private $fullName;

    /**
     * @ORM\PostLoad()
     */
    public function initFullName()
    {
        $this->fullName = $this->lastname . ' ' . $this->firstname;
    }
}