Implement a way of forcing a PersistentCollection to initialize itself

Why not just make the initialize method public on PersistentCollection:

$collection->initialize();

??

Even if that is done, userland code should not use the PersistentCollection API. Remember that a PersistentCollection is supposed to be a transparent wrapper around a Collection implementation. If a user calls $coll->initialize() this code implicitly assumes the concrete type of the collection to be PersistentCollection, which is not a good idea. Userland code should always program to the Collection interface.

Such an initialize method should furthermore handle uninitialized proxies as well as uninitialized collections.

For extra points it might be nice if there was an extra cascade option for initialize, and possibly an event hook for pre and post initialize.

I just ran into a bug with this, I believe. I have a Blog which cascade deletes it's Feeds. In cascadeDetach it's saying the count($relatedEntities) is zero for Feeds after the call to unwrap(), even though I know it to be, say, 1 or 2 (output before detaching owner entity). However, if I do ->count() or count($relatedEntities) BEFORE unwrap(), then PersistentCollection by consequence is initialized, and it cascade deletes correctly. If it don't, it actually says the Feeds are still MANAGED after having detached the owner entity. So, yeah, this or some other form of auto-initialization would be useful.

Note: In Blog, I have DQL which fetches Feeds JOINed to Blog, which may be causing the uninitialization (not sure). I'm using EXTRA LAZY LOADING.

I have also run into a problem with this: when adding a single entity to an empty collection and then calling flush(), the collection which should now have 1 entity in it actually has 2. I discovered that this can be fixed by calling count() on the collection prior to the flush() operation. I looked into the code and noticed that most methods in PersistentCollection.php (v2.0.3) call $this->initialize() as their first step, but the add() function did not. I think this may be an oversight? By adding $this->initialize() to the add() function my problem was resolved.

Hello James, not calling initialize() is a very important performance optimization. Consider your collection containing hundrets, thousands or more entities. You dont want to load them all into memory just to add one new entity.

To solve your problem there is Collection::contains($entity) which will handle your collection correctly. in combination with "EXTRA_LAZY" support introduced in 2.1-DEV this is even very efficient.