Experimental Doctrine 2 Feature: Associated Entities as Id Fields

Doctrine 2 supports composite keys of primitive types from the beginning, however we realized early that a very common use-case is a composite key with one or more elements being associated entities. For example think of a CMS System which allows Article Translations. A common SQL schema for this case would be:

CREATE TABLE article (id INT PRIMARY KEY, 
title VARCHAR(255), 
body LONGTEXT);

CREATE TABLE article_translations (article_id INT, 
language CHAR(3), 
title VARCHAR(255), 
body LONGTEXT, 
PRIMARY KEY (article_id, 
language));

This sort of schema cannot be mapped with Doctrine 2 currently, it would be required to add another column id on the article_translations table and enforce a unique constraint on article_id + language.

Under the umbrella of DDC-117 and some related tickets there were discussions about adding a feature that would help solve this problem: Allowing to add @Id to @ManyToOne or @OneToOne mappings. I committed this feature into an experimental Git branch today and we ask you to test this with as many crazy scenarios and use-cases as possible.

This feature can potentially be uber-powerful, however we want to be sure that it works correctly and does not have to many problematic edge-cases. Therefore we need your feedback.

• Go to http://github.com/doctrine/doctrine2/commits/DDC-117 to see the code
• Have a look at the functional tests to see the synatx
• Checkout the Git Repository and switch to the experimental branch git checkout DDC-117
• Do crazy testing against this branch!

Personally I want this feature in core very much, however composite keys are very tricky. We want to find as many problematic cases with this feature as possible. That would enable us to evaluate if this approach will be merged into Doctrine 2.1 or not.

This feature currently only works with Annotations Mapping Driver. XML and YAML will follow later.

By the way, the previous example is actually one of the functional test-cases for this feature:

<?php

/**
 * @Entity
 */
class DDC117Article
{
    /** @Id @Column(type="integer") @GeneratedValue */
    private $id;
    /** @Column */
    private $title;

    /**
     * @OneToMany(targetEntity="DDC117Translation", mappedBy="article")
     */
    private $translations;

    public function __construct($title)
    {
        $this->title = $title;
        $this->translations = new \Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection();
    }
}

/**
 * @Entity
 */
class DDC117Translation
{
    /**
     * @Id @ManyToOne(targetEntity="DDC117Article")
     */
    private $article;

    /**
     * @Id @column(type="string")
     */
    private $language;

    /**
     * @column(type="string")
     */
    private $title;

    public function __construct($article, $language, $title)
    {
        $this->article = $article;
        $this->language = $language;
        $this->title = $title;
    }
}

$article = new DDC117Article("foo");
$em->persist($article);
$em->flush();

$translation = new DDC117Translation($article, "en", "Bar");
$em->persist($translation);
$em->flush();