Doctrine 2: Give me my constructor back

At ConFoo 2010 during my presentation, someone asked about the constructor of entities in Doctrine 2 and whether or not it could be used. I think this is something worth writing about since in Doctrine 1 this was not possible. The constructor was hi-jacked from you and used internally by Doctrine.

In Doctrine 2 it is possible to define the constructor in your entity classes and is not required to be a zero argument constructor! That's right, Doctrine 2 never instantiates the constructor of your entities so you have complete control!

This is possible due to a small trick which is used by two other projects, php-object-freezer and Flow3. The gist of it is we store a prototype class instance that is unserialized from a hand crafted serialized string where the class name is concatenated into the string. The result when we unserialize the string is an instance of the class which is stored as a prototype and cloned everytime we need a new instance during hydration.

Have a look at the method responsible for this:

<?php

public function newInstance()
{
    if ($this->_prototype === null) {
        $this->_prototype = unserialize(sprintf('O:%d:"%s":0:{}', strlen($this->name), $this->name));
    }
    return clone $this->_prototype;
}

The above code allows us to have entities where we make full use of our constructor like the following class definition:

<?php

namespace Entities;

/** @Entity */
class User
{
    /** @Column */
    private $username;

    /** @Column */
    private $password;

    public function __construct($username, $password)
    {
        $this->username = $username;
        $this->password = md5($password);
    }
}

Now of course you can use the constructor like you would expect:

<?php

use Entities\User;

$user = new User('jwage', 'changeme');

Conclusion

It is an interesting solution and did not have much if any effect on hydration performance. At any rate the cost is well worth it to get complete control of your entities. No longer are the days where Doctrine greedily steals your precious class constructor!