What's your experience with Doctrine ORM? [clo

Question

What's your experience with doctrine? I've never been much of an ORM kind of guy, I mostlymanaged with just some basic db abstraction layer like adodb.

But I understood all the concepts and benifits of it. So when a project came along that needed an ORM I thought that I'd give one of the ORM framework a try.

I've to decide between doctrine and propel so I choose doctrine because I didn't want to handle the phing requirement.

I don't know what I did wrong. I came in with the right mindset. And I am by no means a 'junior' php kiddie. But I've been fighting the system each step of the way. There's a lot of documentation but it all feels a little disorganize. And simple stuff like YAML to db table creation just wouldn;t work and just bork out without even an error or anything. A lot of other stuff works a little funky require just that extra bit of tweaking before working.

Maybe I made some soft of stupid newbie assumption here that once I found out what it is I'll have the aha moment. But now I'm totally hating the system.

Is there maybe some tips anyone can give or maybe point me to a good resource on the subject or some authoritative site/person about this? Or maybe just recommend another ORM framework that 'just works"?

Answer 1

I have mixed feelings. I am a master at SQL only because it is so easy to verify. You can test SELECT statements quickly until you get the results right. And to refactor is a snap.

In Doctorine, or any ORM, there are so many layers of abstraction it almost seems OCD (obsessive/compulsive). In my latest project, in which I tried out Doctrine, I hit several walls. It took me days to figure out a solution for something that I knew I could have written in SQL in a matter of minutes. That is soooo frustrating.

I'm being grumpy. The community for SQL is HUGE. The community/support for Doctrine is minuscule. Sure you could look at the source and try to figure it out ... and those are the issues that take days to figure out.

Bottom line: don't try out Doctrine, or any ORM, without planning in a lot of time for grokking on your own.

Answer 2

I think mtbikemike sums it up perfectly: "It took me days to figure out a solution for something that I knew I could have written in SQL in a matter of minutes." That was also my experience. SAD (Slow Application Development) is guaranteed. Not to mention ugly code and limitations around every corner. Things that should take minutes take days and things that would normally be more complicated and take hours or days are just not doable (or not worth the time). The resulting code is much more verbose and cryptic (because we really need another query language, DQL, to make things even less readable). Strange bugs are all around and most of the time is spent hunting them down and running into limitations and problems. Doctrine (I only used v2.x) is akin to an exercise in futility and has absolutely no benefits. It's by far the most hated component of my current system and really the only one with huge problems. Coming into a new system, I'm always going back and forth from the db to the entity classes trying to figure out which name is proper in different places in the code. A total nightmare.

I don't see a single pro to Doctrine, only cons. I don't know why it exists, and every day I wish it didn't (at least in my projects).

Answer 3

I'm using Doctrine in a medium sized project where I had to work from pre-existing databases I don't own. It gives you alot of built in features, but I have one major complaint.

Since I had to generate my models from the databases and not vice-versa, my models are too close to the database: the fields have very similar names to the database columns, to get objects you have to query in what is essential sql (where do I put that code, and how do I test it?), etc.

In the end I had to write a complex wrapper for doctrine that makes me question if it wouldn't have been easier to just use the old dao/model approach and leave doctrine out of the picture. The jury is still out on that. Good luck!

Answer 4

After some research into the various ORM libraries for PHP, I decided on PHP ActiveRecord. My decision came down to the little-to-no configuration, light-weight nature of the library, and the lack of code generation. Doctrine is simply too powerful for what I need; what PHP ActiveRecord doesn't do I can implement in my wrapper layer. I would suggest taking a moment and examining what your requirements are in an ORM and see if either a simple one like PHP ActiveRecord offers what you need or if a home-rolled active record implementation would be better.

Answer 5

For now I'm using Symfony framework with Doctrine ORM, how about using Doctrine together with plain queries? For e.g. from knpuniversity, I can create custom repository method like:

     public function countNumberPrintedForCategory(Category $category)
    {
        $conn = $this->getEntityManager()
            ->getConnection();
        $sql = '
            SELECT SUM(fc.numberPrinted) as fortunesPrinted, AVG(fc.numberPrinted) as fortunesAverage, cat.name
            FROM fortune_cookie fc
            INNER JOIN category cat ON cat.id = fc.category_id
            WHERE fc.category_id = :category
            ';
        $stmt = $conn->prepare($sql);
        $stmt->execute(array('category' => $category->getId()));
        return $stmt->fetch();
... lines 30 - 37
    }

I'm just use Doctrine Entities for e.g. creating an processing forms, When I need more complex query I just make plain statement and take values I need, from this example I can also pass Entity as variable and take it values for making query. I think this solution is easy understand and it takes less time for building forms, passing data for them and writing complex queries is not as hard as writing them with Doctrine.

Answer 6

we have been using Propel with Symfony for 2 years and Doctrine with Symfony for more than 1 year. I can say that moving to ORM with MVC framework was the best step we've made. I would recommend sticking with Doctrine eventhough it takes some time to learn how to work with it. In the end you'll find your code more readable and flexible.

If you're searching for some place where to start, I would recommend Symfony Jobeet tutorial http://www.symfony-project.org/jobeet/1_4/Doctrine/en/ (chapters 3, 6 covers the basics) and of course Doctrine documentation.

As I wrote above we have been using Doctrine for some time now. To make our work more comfortable we developed a tool called ORM Designer (www.orm-designer.com) where you can define DB model in a graphical user interface (no more YAML files :-), which aren't btw bad at all). You can find there also some helpful tutorials.