Getting the primary key of a reference fetches the object from database

Something like this would be awesome :

class MyEntity {

    /**
     * @Id @Getter('getId')
     */
    $id;

    /** declared getter on an @Id property, this method is not proxied / do not triggers database fetches */
    function getId() {
    }
}

Or this:

class MyEntity {

    /**
      * @NoProxy
      */
    function getId() {
    }
}

We thought about that but there is always the risk that these methods, for whatever reason, have side-effects and/or access other entity state, in which case lazy-loading is completely bypassed. As you already have noticed Doctrine right now can simply not know what is an "id getter" and moreso whether it is free of side-effects.

Meanwhile you can always get the identifier of any managed object (all "references" are managed, as well as all partial objects and all proxies) without triggering any lazy-loading via:

$id = $em->getUnitOfWork()->getEntityIdentifier($object);

Hope that helps.

Thanks

> We thought about that but there is always the risk that these methods, for whatever reason, have side-effects and/or access other entity state, in which case lazy-loading is completely bypassed

Then it would be the responsibility of @NoProxy getters to take care of what they do. Entities already have this kind of responsibility with lazy-loaded references (i.e. some private fields can't be accessed directly by the entity itself).

Actually you can even make the proxy getter return the primary key directly

@"Entities already have this kind of responsibility with lazy-loaded references (i.e. some private fields can't be accessed directly by the entity itself)."

Can you clarify what you mean with that? I am not aware of such a restriction.

I was wrong on this one, there is no such restriction.

This issue can be solved with the implementation of DDC-522