i'm building a Q&A site and my questions, answers and comments are on the same posts
table. But their postType
is different. I can get answers for a question and comments for an answer with this association:
/**
* @OneToMany(targetEntity="Cms\Entity\Post", mappedBy="parent")
*/
private $answers;
/**
* @OneToMany(targetEntity="Cms\Entity\Post", mappedBy="parent")
*/
private $comments;
But i think this is not the correct way to do this because if i fetch a question both answers and comments are filling with just answers. I have to set a condition for relation like postType = 1
How can i do this?
Your schema is invalid. You schould have two different objects for answers and comments as they are two different things, even if they share a common interface.
You should create two entities, Answer
and Comment
and create assocations to them. As they are almost the same thing you could create an abstract class, AbstractContent
, that defines all required fields and accessor methods. Doctrine supports inheritance so the final database schema will be exactly the same, but your OO model will be correct.
/**
* @MappedSuperclass
* @InheritanceType("SINGLE_TABLE")
* @DiscriminatorColumn(type = "string", name = "discriminator")
* @DiscriminatorMap({ "answer" = "Answer", "comment" = "Comment" })
*/
abstract class AbstractContent {
/** @Column(type = "integer") @Id @GeneratedValue("AUTO") */
protected $id;
/** @Column(type="text") */
protected $content;
/** @Column(type = "datetime", name = "created_at") */
protected $createdAt;
public function __construct() {
$this->createdAt = new \DateTime();
}
}
/** @Entity */
class Answer extends AbstractContent { }
/** @Entity */
class Comment extends AbstractContent { }
/**
* @OneToMany(targetEntity="Cms\Entity\Answer", mappedBy="parent")
*/
private $answers;
/**
* @OneToMany(targetEntity="Cms\Entity\Comment", mappedBy="parent")
*/
private $comments;
You can read more about inheritance in Doctrine on its documentation pages: Inheritance Mapping
Use Doctrine's Filtering Collections Criteria class. You can even filter the collection first before the sql query:
If the collection has not been loaded from the database yet, the
filtering API can work on the SQL level to make optimized access to
large collections.
use Doctrine\Common\Collections\Collection;
use Doctrine\Common\Collections\Criteria;
...
/** @var Collection */
protected $posts;
/**
* @return Post[]
*/
public function getAnswers()
{
$criteria = Criteria::create()
->where(Criteria::expr()->eq('postType', 'answer'))
;
return $this->posts->matching($criteria);
}
/**
* @return Post[]
*/
public function getComments()
{
$criteria = Criteria::create()
->where(Criteria::expr()->eq('postType', 'comment'))
;
return $this->posts->matching($criteria);
}