删除OneToMany元素，Doctrine2

Question

I've got this model; Itinerary, Venue, ItineraryVenue.

I needed many to many relation between itineraries and venues but also I wanted to store some specific data about the relation (say notes, own photo, etc.), so I decided to introduce a new entity named ItineraryVenue.

So Itinerary has collection of ItineraryVenues which in turn, refer to Venues.

My problem is that I can't remove ItineraryVenue from a Itinerary object.

$itinerary->itineraryVenues->removeElement($itineraryVenue);
$em->flush();

removes element from the php collection, but doesn't remove this $itineraryVenue from database.

I've managed to force Doctrine2 to remove $itineraryVenue, but only when I annotate the Itinerary::$itineraryVenues with orphanRemoval=true .

Since orphan removal treats Venue as a private property it also removes Venue entity, I don't want that.

Is there an relation configuration option or is removing "by hand" the olny way to make it work as I want?

Hard to believe it, it's a common relation pattern.

Entities definitions:

class Itinerary
{
    /**
     * @ORM\OneToMany(targetEntity="ItineraryVenue", mappedBy="itinerary", cascade={"persist", "remove"})
     */
    private $itineraryVenues;

    function __construct()
    {
        $this->itineraryVenues = new ArrayCollection();
    }
}

class ItineraryVenue
{
    /**
     * @ORM\ManyToOne(targetEntity="Itinerary", inversedBy="itineraryVenues")
     */
    private $itinerary;
    /**
     * @ORM\ManyToOne(targetEntity="Venue")
     */
    private $venue;

    function __construct()
    {
    }
}

class Venue
{
}

Answer 1

You are doing things right: orphanRemoval - is what you need. So, you should override default Itinerary::removeItineraryVenue like

public function removeItineraryVenue(\AppBundle\Entity\ItineraryVenue $itineraryVenue)
{
    $itineraryVenue->setItinerary(null);
    $this->itineraryVenues->removeElement($itineraryVenue);
}

The full working example is here https://github.com/kaduev13/removing-onetomany-elements-doctrine2 .