TL;DR - Adding support to an existing Symfony 3.4 application for Doctrine

(If you like the work I do on OpenCFP, please consider sponsoring me at https://github.com/sponsors/chartjes/)

Part of the medium-term planning for OpenCFP is to refactor the application to stop using Sentinel as the authentication and ACL choice and start using the Symfony Scurity component.

When OpenCFP was first built it was a more standalone solution and I picked Sentinel's predecessor, Sentry. As it got deprecated, we moved to Sentinel and along the way we added in some code to make Eloquent easier to use within the app. When switching to be more Symfony-based, Doctrine is the ORM that needs to be used. So I have a refactoring process that looks like this:

• Get Doctrine and it's dependencies into the project
• Refactor everything except our auth stuff to use Doctrine
• Refactor our authentication and authorization code to use Symfony Security
• Remove Sentinel and all it's dependencies

I had not used Doctrine in many many years so a lot of things have changed. Given all the trouble I had, I figured I was not alone so it makes sense to document the changes and additions I made.

As with most work I do on OpenCFP, this was a journey of discovering things I needed to know that I did not know.

Packages

Following the directions for Symfony 3.4 I installed my dependencies:

composer require doctrine/orm
composer require doctrine/doctrine-bundle
composer require doctrine/doctrine-cache-bundle

Right now, composer show says I have the following Doctrine-related packages installed now

doctrine/annotations                v1.8.0  
doctrine/cache                      1.9.1   
doctrine/collections                1.6.4   
doctrine/common                     v2.11.0 
doctrine/data-fixtures              1.4.0   
doctrine/dbal                       v2.10.0 
doctrine/doctrine-bundle            1.12.2  
doctrine/doctrine-cache-bundle      1.4.0   
doctrine/doctrine-fixtures-bundle   3.3.0   
doctrine/event-manager              1.1.0   
doctrine/inflector                  1.3.1   
doctrine/instantiator               1.3.0   
doctrine/lexer                      1.2.0   
doctrine/orm                        v2.7.0  
doctrine/persistence                1.2.0   
doctrine/reflection                 v1.0.0  
symfony/doctrine-bridge             v3.4.35 

I may have installed some of these packages manually, but who knows.

Enable Doctrine in the application

The first sign I had no idea what I was doing was when I could not see any of the Doctrine-related commands when I used bin/console. After moaning on Twitter and asking some questions on Stack Overflow, I realized it would not automatically find it. so I added a line to my Kernel.php file so that the bundle would be available.

    public function registerBundles()
    {
        $bundles = [
            new FrameworkBundle(),
            new SensioFrameworkExtraBundle(),
            new MonologBundle(),
            new TwigBundle(),
            new SwiftmailerBundle(),
            new WouterJEloquentBundle(),
            new OneupFlysystemBundle(),
            new DoctrineBundle(),
        ];

        if ($this->getEnvironment() !== Environment::TYPE_PRODUCTION) {
            $bundles[] = new DebugBundle();
        }

        if ($this->getEnvironment() === Environment::TYPE_DEVELOPMENT) {
            $bundles[] = new WebServerBundle();
            $bundles[] = new WebProfilerBundle();
        }

        return $bundles;
    }

Making repositories available as a service

I had to update my `resources/config/services/services.yml' file with the following new section to allow the app to find and inject all the repository files I was going to create:

 OpenCFP\Domain\Repository\:
    public: true
    resource: '%kernel.project_dir%/src/Domain/Repository/*'

Configuration Files

To make Doctrine see the database connections, I had to modify the following files:

resources/config/config_development.yml
resources/config/config_testing.yml
resources/config/config_production.yml

adding in the following details (determined through trial-and-error and online searches for help)

doctrine:
  dbal:
    url: mysql://root:@127.0.0.1:3306/cfp
    default_table_options:
      charset: utm8mb4
      collate: utg8mb4_unicode_ci
  orm:
    auto_mapping: true
    auto_generate_proxy_classes: true
    mappings:
      OpenCFP\Domain\Entity:
        type: annotation
        dir: "%kernel.root_dir%/../src/Domain/Entity"
        prefix: OpenCFP\Domain\Entity

Early on I had my integration test suite failing to even run because it was complaining it could not find the new repository I had created:

<?php

declare(strict_types=1);

/**
 * Copyright (c) 2013-2019 OpenCFP
 *
 * For the full copyright and license information, please view
 * the LICENSE file that was distributed with this source code.
 *
 * @see https://github.com/opencfp/opencfp
 */

namespace OpenCFP\Domain\Repository;

use Doctrine\ORM\EntityManagerInterface;
use Doctrine\ORM\EntityRepository;
use OpenCFP\Domain\Entity\Airport;

final class AirportRepository
{
    /**
     * @var EntityRepository
     */
    private $repository;

    public function __construct(EntityManagerInterface $entityManager)
    {
        $this->repository = $entityManager->getRepository(Airport::class);
    }

    public function withCode(string $code): ?Airport
    {
        $airport = $this->repository->findOneByCode($code);

        if ($airport !== null) {
            return $airport;
        }

        return null;
    }
}

Here's the entity I created to go with it

<?php

declare(strict_types=1);

/**
 * Copyright (c) 2013-2019 OpenCFP
 *
 * For the full copyright and license information, please view
 * the LICENSE file that was distributed with this source code.
 *
 * @see https://github.com/opencfp/opencfp
 */

namespace OpenCFP\Domain\Entity;

use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;

/**
 * @ORM\Entity
 * @ORM\Table(name="airports")
 */
final class Airport
{
    /**
     * @ORM\Column(type="string", length=3)
     * @ORM\Id
     */
    private $code;

    /**
     * @ORM\Column(type="string", length=255)
     */
    private $name;

    /**
     * @ORM\Column(type="string", length=255)
     */
    private $country;

    /**
     * @return mixed
     */
    public function getCode()
    {
        return $this->code;
    }

    /**
     * @return mixed
     */
    public function getName()
    {
        return $this->name;
    }

    /**
     * @return mixed
     */
    public function getCountry()
    {
        return $this->country;
    }
}

The issue turned out to be I needed to set auto_generate_proxy_classes to be true. The error messages from the application itself were not helpful (complaining it could not inject the EntityManagerInterface my code was using). Anyway, once I figured that out my integration test suite passed. Now I could go and modify my code to use the new repository instead of the Eloquent model.

Here's a summary of the steps I took to update the action that uses airport details

• removed references to the AirportInformationDatabase object that was used to access the list of airports and codes
• added in the use of the new AirportRepository object
• updated the constructor for the action to accept AirportRepository as a parameter via the magic of autowiring dependencies
• updated the code to use the new repository (and fix a code smell involving an exception being caught but never reacted to)

So now my tests pass and I have a way to add more Doctrine entities and repositories going forward.