We are happy to announce the availability of Doctrine Common, DBAL and ORM versions 2.4. This took us much longer than planned and we are very sorry for all the delay that was mostly caused by contributers private and work lifes. For the next versions we will also try to keep the scope smaller, you will see that version 2.4 contains lots of small new features.

Starting with version 2.4 Doctrine will not be available over PEAR anymore. The maintenance of this deployment channel is too complicated, compared to the small number of people using it. We focus on shipping Doctrine with Composer , which is a superior packaging tool in our opinion. We will continue to make Doctrine available as standalone download through the Github releases pages.

Follow the links in the list to find the changelogs of the three new releases:

• Doctrine Common v2.4.1 Changelog
• Doctrine DBAL v2.4.0 Changelog
• Doctrine ORM v2.4.0 Changelog

Backwards Incompatible Changes

There have been some BC breaks in the 2.4 releases, which are listed here:

• DoctrineDBALSchemaConstraint API change
• Compatibility Bugfix in PersistentCollection#matching()
• Composer is now the default autoloader
• OnFlush and PostFlush event always called
• DQL: Parenthesis are now considered in arithmetic expression

You can read up in detail on BC breaks on the DBAL and ORM UPGRADE docs.

Installation

You can install Doctrine using Composer and the following composer.json contents:

{
    "require": {
        "doctrine/common": "2.4.*",
        "doctrine/dbal": "2.4.*",
        "doctrine/orm": "2.4.*"
    }
}

New Features

This release contains large amount of new features and improvements. Compared to the previous minor release not so many big-bang features, but many small improvements. The most important changes are listed here with small examples or links to their documentation.

• ALTER TABLE support for SQLite (by hason) by creating new tables, moving all the data and then renaming.
• Using `EXTRA_LAZY` fetch mode now also queries for single entities on collections with indexBy when using $collection->get() or accessing the collection via array access.
• Added two new modes to proxy generation for development environemnts, first using eval and second by checking if the proxy file not exists.
• Pass Event Arguments to entities lifecycle methods, allowing access to EntityManager.
• Allow to order by associations when using EntityRepository#findBy().
• Support for new `NEW()` operator in DQL which can be wrapped around the full SELECT-clause parts and instantiates an object by passing the parameters to the constructor. See the documentation for more details.
• Support for @EntityListener annotation and XML/YML configuration, which allows adding listener services on a per entity level (not global). See the documentation for details.
• Improved the ResultSetMapping to generate the SELECT clause for an SQL statement, thereby improving the usability of native queries alot. See the documentation for more details.
• Introduced a factory for repositories that can be overwritten in the Doctrine\ORM\Configuration.
• Added an interface for EntityManager called Doctrine\ORM\EntityManagerInterface and a decorator base class Doctrine\ORM\Decorator\EntityManagerDecorator.
• Support for proxy objects for entities with public properties.
• Add support for composite primary keys in DQL IDENTITY() function. See the documentation for more details.
• Introduced ANSI SQL Quoting Strategy that does not attempt to quote and modify columns during SQL generation.
• Joins between arbitrary entities are now possible in DQL by using the syntax FROM Foo f JOIN Bar b WITH f.id = b.id.

Documentation

With 2.4 we merged the documentation into the repositories itself. We have seen a much increased amount of Pull Requests since then and also improved the documentation ourselves quite alot for 2.4.

Besides fixes and additions of all the new features, we tried to improve the style of the documentation. Many of the chapters have been refactored completly and hopefully address many of the valid concers of our users.