Doctrine ORM Beta 3 released

We would like to announce the immediate release of Doctrine ORM BETA 3:

• Installation
• Changelog

We fixed 45 issues, most of them bugs reported by our users. The ORM package is now in a state where no new features will be added and we will fully concentrate the efforts on fixing bugs and bringing the release to a stable state.

Notable changes include:

• EntityManager#merge() has been improved considerably and now also accepts new entities.
• Uninitialized Proxies can now be serialized and only throw an exception when they are unserialized and accessed without being merged into the EntityManager.
• New method EntityManager#getPartialReference() that returns a partial entity that only contains the entities primary key and won't lazy-load (hence "partial").

This release contains three backwards incompatible changes you should know about when upgrading:

Changed SQL implementation of Postgres and Oracle DateTime types

The DBAL Type "datetime" included the Timezone Offset in both Postgres and Oracle. As of this version they are now generated without Timezone (TIMESTAMP WITHOUT TIME ZONE instead of TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE). See this comment to Ticket DBAL-22 for more details as well as migration issues for PostgreSQL and Oracle.

Both Postgres and Oracle will throw Exceptions during hydration of Objects with "DateTime" fields unless migration steps are taken!

Removed multi-dot/deep-path expressions in DQL

The support for implicit joins in DQL through the multi-dot/Deep Path Expressions was dropped. For example:

SELECT 
u 
FROM User u 
WHERE u.group.name = ?1

"u.group.name" is a nested path expression that is an implicit join. Internally the DQL parser would rewrite these queries to:

SELECT 
u 
FROM User u JOIN u.group g 
WHERE g.name = ?1

This explicit notation will be the only supported notation as of now. The internal handling of nested path expressions for implicit joins in the DQL Parser was too complex and error prone in edge cases and required special treatment for several features we added. Note that this does not remove any existing functionality, only a convenience notation that can be expressed otherwise. Hence the generated SQL of both notations is exactly the same.

Default Allocation Size for Sequences

The default allocation size for sequences has been changed from 10 to 1. This step was made to not cause confusion with users and also because it is partly some kind of premature optimization.

What next

It seems likely that we will not be able to hold the anticipated release date of September 1st for the final release. Instead September 1st will likely see the last beta release, BETA 4, after which we hope to enter the release candiates soon, followed by the stable release.