Many to Many Bidirectional
Sección: Symfony
Creado: 21-11-24
<?php
/** @Entity */
class User
{
// ...
/**
* @ManyToMany(targetEntity="Group", inversedBy="users")
* @JoinTable(name="users_groups")
*/
private $groups;
public function __construct() {
$this->groups = new \Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection();
}
// ...
}
/** @Entity */
class Group
{
// ...
/**
* @ManyToMany(targetEntity="User", mappedBy="groups")
*/
private $users;
public function __construct() {
$this->users = new \Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection();
}
// ...
}
5.9.1. Owning and Inverse Side on a ManyToMany association
For Many-To-Many associations you can chose which entity is the owning and which the inverse side. There is a very simple semantic rule to decide which side is more suitable to be the owning side from a developers perspective. You only have to ask yourself, which entity is responsible for the connection management and pick that as the owning side.
Take an example of two entities Article and Tag. Whenever you want to connect an Article to a Tag and vice-versa, it is mostly the Article that is responsible for this relation. Whenever you add a new article, you want to connect it with existing or new tags. Your create Article form will probably support this notion and allow to specify the tags directly. This is why you should pick the Article as owning side, as it makes the code more understandable:
<?php
class Article
{
private $tags;
public function addTag(Tag $tag)
{
$tag->addArticle($this); // synchronously updating inverse side
$this->tags[] = $tag;
}
}
class Tag
{
private $articles;
public function addArticle(Article $article)
{
$this->articles[] = $article;
}
}
This allows to group the tag adding on the Article side of the association:
<?php $article = new Article(); $article->addTag($tagA); $article->addTag($tagB);