Symfony2 Doctrine blob type

Question

I have legacy database that I am working with, which has binary column and stores some strings in it (I know that this is stupid, but I am not allowed to change that). I had problem that those string in that blob are stored in 'UTF-16LE' charset, but I solved it by using php iconv function in my getter.

return iconv('UTF-16LE', 'UTF-8', $this->binstring);

Now the problem is that have doctrine annotation

/**
 * @var string
 *
 * @ORM\Column(name="colname", type="string", nullable=true)
 */
 private $binstring;

and the column type in database is "BINARY(40)" and when I use doctrine migrations or update schema directly it tryes to change that type to "VARCHAR" this is unwanted behavior and I would like to eliminate it. How could I do that?

Answer 1

Try using columnDefinition annotation

http://docs.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-orm/en/latest/reference/annotations-reference.html#annref-column