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Handling Annotations

There are several different approaches to handling annotations in PHP. Doctrine Annotations maps docblock annotations to PHP classes. Because not all docblock annotations are used for metadata purposes a filter is applied to ignore or skip classes that are not Doctrine annotations.

Take a look at the following code snippet:

1namespace MyProject\Entities; use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping AS ORM; use Symfony\Component\Validator\Constraints AS Assert; /** * @author Benjamin Eberlei * @ORM\Entity * @MyProject\Annotations\Foobarable */ class User { /** * @ORM\Id @ORM\Column @ORM\GeneratedValue * @dummy * @var int */ private $id; /** * @ORM\Column(type="string") * @Assert\NotEmpty * @Assert\Email * @var string */ private $email; }
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In this snippet you can see a variety of different docblock annotations:

  • Documentation annotations such as @var and @author. These annotations are ignored and never considered for throwing an exception due to wrongly used annotations.
  • Annotations imported through use statements. The statement use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping AS ORM makes all classes under that namespace available as @ORM\ClassName. Same goes for the import of @Assert.
  • The @dummy annotation. It is not a documentation annotation and not ignored. For Doctrine Annotations it is not entirely clear how to handle this annotation. Depending on the configuration an exception (unknown annotation) will be thrown when parsing this annotation.
  • The fully qualified annotation @MyProject\Annotations\Foobarable. This is transformed directly into the given class name.

How are these annotations loaded? From looking at the code you could guess that the ORM Mapping, Assert Validation and the fully qualified annotation can just be loaded using the defined PHP autoloaders. This is not the case however: For error handling reasons every check for class existence inside the AnnotationReader sets the second parameter $autoload of class_exists($name, $autoload) to false. To work flawlessly the AnnotationReader requires silent autoloaders which many autoloaders are not. Silent autoloading is NOT part of the PSR-0 specification for autoloading.

This is why Doctrine Annotations uses its own autoloading mechanism through a global registry. If you are wondering about the annotation registry being global, there is no other way to solve the architectural problems of autoloading annotation classes in a straightforward fashion. Additionally if you think about PHP autoloading then you recognize it is a global as well.

To anticipate the configuration section, making the above PHP class work with Doctrine Annotations requires this setup:

1use Doctrine\Common\Annotations\AnnotationReader; use Doctrine\Common\Annotations\AnnotationRegistry; AnnotationRegistry::registerFile("/path/to/doctrine/lib/Doctrine/ORM/Mapping/Driver/DoctrineAnnotations.php"); AnnotationRegistry::registerAutoloadNamespace("Symfony\Component\Validator\Constraint", "/path/to/symfony/src"); AnnotationRegistry::registerAutoloadNamespace("MyProject\Annotations", "/path/to/myproject/src"); $reader = new AnnotationReader(); AnnotationReader::addGlobalIgnoredName('dummy');
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The second block with the annotation registry calls registers all the three different annotation namespaces that are used. Doctrine Annotations saves all its annotations in a single file, that is why AnnotationRegistry#registerFile is used in contrast to AnnotationRegistry#registerAutoloadNamespace which creates a PSR-0 compatible loading mechanism for class to file names.

In the third block, we create the actual AnnotationReader instance. Note that we also add dummy to the global list of ignored annotations for which we do not throw exceptions. Setting this is necessary in our example case, otherwise @dummy would trigger an exception to be thrown during the parsing of the docblock of MyProject\Entities\User#id.

Setup and Configuration

To use the annotations library is simple, you just need to create a new AnnotationReader instance:

1$reader = new \Doctrine\Common\Annotations\AnnotationReader();

This creates a simple annotation reader with no caching other than in memory (in php arrays). Since parsing docblocks can be expensive you should cache this process by using a caching reader.

You can use a file caching reader, but please note it is deprecated to do so:

1use Doctrine\Common\Annotations\FileCacheReader; use Doctrine\Common\Annotations\AnnotationReader; $reader = new FileCacheReader( new AnnotationReader(), "/path/to/cache", $debug = true );
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If you set the debug flag to true the cache reader will check for changes in the original files, which is very important during development. If you don't set it to true you have to delete the directory to clear the cache. This gives faster performance, however should only be used in production, because of its inconvenience during development.

You can also use one of the Doctrine\Common\Cache\Cache cache implementations to cache the annotations:

1use Doctrine\Common\Annotations\AnnotationReader; use Doctrine\Common\Annotations\CachedReader; use Doctrine\Common\Cache\ApcCache; $reader = new CachedReader( new AnnotationReader(), new ApcCache(), $debug = true );
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The debug flag is used here as well to invalidate the cache files when the PHP class with annotations changed and should be used during development.

.. warning :

The ``AnnotationReader`` works and caches under the
assumption that all annotations of a doc-block are processed at
once. That means that annotation classes that do not exist and
aren't loaded and cannot be autoloaded (using the
AnnotationRegistry) would never be visible and not accessible if a
cache is used unless the cache is cleared and the annotations
requested again, this time with all annotations defined.

By default the annotation reader returns a list of annotations with numeric indexes. If you want your annotations to be indexed by their class name you can wrap the reader in an IndexedReader:

1use Doctrine\Common\Annotations\AnnotationReader; use Doctrine\Common\Annotations\IndexedReader; $reader = new IndexedReader(new AnnotationReader());
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You should never wrap the indexed reader inside a cached reader, only the other way around. This way you can re-use the cache with indexed or numeric keys, otherwise your code may experience failures due to caching in a numerical or indexed format.

Registering Annotations

As explained in the introduction, Doctrine Annotations uses its own autoloading mechanism to determine if a given annotation has a corresponding PHP class that can be autoloaded. For annotation autoloading you have to configure the Doctrine\Common\Annotations\AnnotationRegistry. There are three different mechanisms to configure annotation autoloading:

  • Calling AnnotationRegistry#registerFile($file) to register a file that contains one or more annotation classes.
  • Calling AnnotationRegistry#registerNamespace($namespace, $dirs = null) to register that the given namespace contains annotations and that their base directory is located at the given $dirs or in the include path if NULL is passed. The given directories should NOT be the directory where classes of the namespace are in, but the base directory of the root namespace. The AnnotationRegistry uses a namespace to directory separator approach to resolve the correct path.
  • Calling AnnotationRegistry#registerLoader($callable) to register an autoloader callback. The callback accepts the class as first and only parameter and has to return true if the corresponding file was found and included.

Loaders have to fail silently, if a class is not found even if it matches for example the namespace prefix of that loader. Never is a loader to throw a warning or exception if the loading failed otherwise parsing doc block annotations will become a huge pain.

A sample loader callback could look like:

1use Doctrine\Common\Annotations\AnnotationRegistry; use Symfony\Component\ClassLoader\UniversalClassLoader; AnnotationRegistry::registerLoader(function($class) { $file = str_replace("\\", DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR, $class) . ".php"; if (file_exists("/my/base/path/" . $file)) { // file_exists() makes sure that the loader fails silently require "/my/base/path/" . $file; } }); $loader = new UniversalClassLoader(); AnnotationRegistry::registerLoader(array($loader, "loadClass"));
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Ignoring missing exceptions

By default an exception is thrown from the AnnotationReader if an annotation was found that:

  • is not part of the list of ignored "documentation annotations";
  • was not imported through a use statement;
  • is not a fully qualified class that exists.

You can disable this behavior for specific names if your docblocks do not follow strict requirements:

1$reader = new \Doctrine\Common\Annotations\AnnotationReader(); AnnotationReader::addGlobalIgnoredName('foo');
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PHP Imports

By default the annotation reader parses the use-statement of a php file to gain access to the import rules and register them for the annotation processing. Only if you are using PHP Imports can you validate the correct usage of annotations and throw exceptions if you misspelled an annotation. This mechanism is enabled by default.

To ease the upgrade path, we still allow you to disable this mechanism. Note however that we will remove this in future versions:

1$reader = new \Doctrine\Common\Annotations\AnnotationReader(); $reader->setEnabledPhpImports(false);
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