DQL Ignores properties of subclasses

Thats indeed tricky. That syntax alone can, however, never work, because there might be several subclasses that have a field named "d", so Doctrine would not know which field you mean.

We might need special syntax for such constructs but I'm not sure it is worth it. If anyone has an idea, just shoot.

Alternatively, apart from using a native query, what about this DQL:

select a from A a where a.id not in (select c.id from C c where c.d = 2)

I am sorry, but isn't this sort of query a violation of object oriented programming, Accessing a Superclass A and checking for a property that exists on a certain child is not possible in any strict OO language without specific casting into the type beforehand.

Thats why I said "we would need special syntax for such constructs", i.e. casting syntax

However, the alternative query I showed should work just fine for such purposes.

+1 for this request.

When displaying data (stored in a database) to end-users using generated tables, server-side sorting and filtering on properties that belong to subclasses is a common task, for instance to provide the data presented in a JQuery Datatable: http://www.datatables.net.

For this purpose, DQL is great to generate the required queries dynamically. However, since properties of subclasses can currently not be 'accessed', sorting and filtering on these properties becomes impossible, or at least cumbersome to implement. Currently I have lifted/copied specific properties to a general 'value' property of the superclass, which CAN be used for ordering and filtering. Of course, this work-around significantly decreases the power of inheritance strategy in the originally envisioned model.

In Hibernate this seems to have been solved in HQL using downcasting, which seems a viable approach, but as Benjamin already mentioned not a best practice in a strict OO approach. Therefore a specific syntax might be required to hint on the to-be-expected casts:

• http://www.mail-archive.com/hibernate-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg03975.html
• https://hibernate.onjira.com/browse/HB-792
• https://hibernate.onjira.com/browse/HB-132

For additional motivation of this subject, check a recent post of mine at the user groups: http://groups.google.com/group/doctrine-user/msg/caebf8139e06e01a

Honestly I gave up on all of this a long time ago, and now use a CQRS approach. I make views, or denormalized tables for every view in my application, and just use straight SQL.

When I need to do creating or updating or whatever, I use doctrine.

I would like this as well (though my use case involves joining to the subclass).

Registration has one Opponent (superclass to Player and TeamSelection). I would like to count the number of registrations for a particular team within a specific tournament. For example:

SELECT COUNT(*)
FROM Registration r
INNER JOIN r.opponent CAST TeamSelection ts
INNER JOIN ts.team t
WHERE r.tournament = 1
AND t.name = "Team #1"

Thinking about this a bit more, it can actually improve query performance, as it would no longer be necessary to join the other subclasses. In other words, since you're casting the opponent to a TeamSelection, it's not necessary to join to the players table.

A cast should probably also restrict the result using the discriminator column, for example (SQL):

INNER JOIN opponents o ON o.id = r.opponent_d AND o.type = "TeamSelection"

Possible solution:

SELECT p FROM CAST(Person AS User) p

Or:

SELECT a, p FROM Article a JOIN CAST(a.person AS User) p

If you're casting a Person (superclass) to a User (subclass), then shouldn't the alias be "u" and not "p"?

i.e. SELECT a, u FROM Article a JOIN CAST(a.person AS User) u

the alias is that, an alias, you can use whatever you want.

Yes I know that, I'm just making sure that I understand the syntax.

I just ran into a similar problem and am not sure the above cast solution would do.

I'm trying to do:

SELECT
    s
FROM
    Superclass s
WHERE
    s INSTANCE OF SubclassA OR
    s INSTANCE OF SubclassB AND s.foo = 'bar';

So I'd need to use CAST in a WHERE condition, not in the FROM/JOIN clause, e.g:

SELECT
    s
FROM
    Superclass s
WHERE
    s INSTANCE OF SubclassA OR
    s INSTANCE OF SubclassB AND (CAST s AS SubclassB).foo = 'bar';

Is there any workaround? Would be perfect if I could just:

 SELECT a, p FROM Article a JOIN CAST(a.person AS User) p 

(+1 for Guilherme Blanco possible solution)

I was trying a workaround:

Before executing the dql query, I change the mapping info of the association to the concrete type that I was going to use. Like this:

        $cmf = $this->em->getMetadataFactory();
        $class = $cmf->getMetadataFor("Article");
        $class->associationMappings["person"]["targetEntity"]="User";

But now my problem is that I'm actually using an inverse side (in query where this is needed), so when I change the targetEntity, the sql join that is generated, is using the table of the concrete class (User in this case) and not the base class (Person)

class Person {
...
	/**
	 * @OneToOne(targetEntity="Order",cascade={"persist"})
	 * @JoinColumn(name="order_id", referencedColumnName="orden_id")
	 */
	private $order;
...
}

class Order {
...
    /**
     * @OneToOne(targetEntity="Person", mappedBy="order")
     */
    private $person;
...
}

The SQL generated is joining as if the "user" table has orden_id field

I am closing this one.

The requirement of this issue is basically violating OO principles.

If you really need to filter across multiple child-entities in your inheritance, then try something as following instead:

SELECT
    r
FROM
    Root r
WHERE
    r.id IN (
        SELECT
            c.id
        FROM
            Child c
        WHERE
            c.field = :value
    )

Up-casting is not really a viable solution anyway, since it would be even more weird to cast in DQL and then have hydration still retrieve the root entity type.