We should optimize code-generation somehow.

Our current code-generation tool has many shortcomings and due to its hard to test nature also many (known and unknown) bugs, as well as high maintenance.

Since people are overusing this tool and I am sort of annoyed by how much time goes into this we should rewrite this in a two-step procedure:

1. Move code into Common so we can share it between ORM, Mongo and CouchDB.
2. Use PDepend to read an entities source file (it generates an AST) and modify the AST with the required changes.

This gives us the advantage of having to maintaining less code for this stuff.

We need a new coding standards document for Doctrine 2.

Please make it more clear that prePersist and postPersist events are called only when creating new entity (that is, prior and after a database insert).

IRC log:
helmer
Hi. I have a question regarding (pre|post)persist events. Why are the events ignored for second persist (should fire prePersist) + flush (should fire postPersist) in the following pastie: http://pastebin.com/V8CrPWkM Is it a bug or am I missing sth?
Stof
helmer: there is no second persist. persist() means saying Doctrine to manage the entity. Once it is managed, you are not persisting it anymore but updating it
helmer
Stof: so basically one could define these two events for themselves as (pre|post)Insert?
beberlei
yes
helmer
thanks beberlei&stof! though a suggestion to docteam .. perhaps make it more clear to people like me, current doc can be kind of misleading ie: "There are two ways for the prePersist event to be triggered. One is obviously when you call EntityManager#persist()" http://www.doctrine-project.org/docs/orm/2.0/en/reference/events.html#prepersist

Pastie code (probably expired by now):
$entity = new Entity();

$entity->setSomething('xxx');
$this->em->persist($entity);
$this->em->flush();

$entity->setSomething('yyy');
$this->em->persist($entity);
$this->em->flush();

See: http://www.doctrine-project.org/documentation/manual/2_0/en/annotations-reference#ann_mappedsuperclass

@MappedSuperclass

An mapped superclass is an abstract or concrete class that provides persistent entity state and mapping information for its subclasses, but which is not itself an entity. This annotation is specified on the Class docblock and has no additional attributes.

This doesn't adequately communicate how to use it. It took me several minutes of failing before I downloaded the PDF and did a search for @MappedSuperclass to find an example of how it's used.

Specifically the following were unclear:

• Is this defined on the superclass or on the children classes?
• If it's defined on the child classes, does it take parameters? The name of the super class?
• It was not at all apparent to me that it was mutually exclusive with the @Entity tag

In the YAML/XML, if no GeneratedValue strategy is given for the primary key, a setter function is required in the generated entity class. Currently only a getter is made.