Symfony: Entity with flexible relations and it's (sub-)forms - how to design?

Question

I have a User -Entity with the very base information. The User should be able to share more detailed data in a profile. There are different ProfileSet s for different User s.

In this example I try to keep it simple: ProfileSet_A is a profile with personal information, ProfileSet_B stores anonymous data.

A User can only have one ProfileSet .

Entities (Pseudocode)

// table: users
class User {
    protected $id,
              $email, 
              $username, 
              $password; // ...
}

// table: - none - 
class ProfileSet {
    protected $id,
              $name; // ...
}

// table: profileset_a
class ProfileSet_A extends ProfileSet {
    protected $firstname,
              $lastname,
              $morePrivateStuff; // ...
}

// table: profileset_b
class ProfileSet_B extends ProfileSet {
    protected $anyAnonymousStuff; // ...
}

// table: user_has_profileset
class UserHasProfileSet {
    protected $user,       // relation to User
              $profileSet; // relation to ProfileSet_A OR ProfileSet_B
}

Form, ProfileSet_A

username:            [ textfield ]
email:               [ textfield ]
firstname:           [ textfield ]
lastname:            [ textfield ]
morePrivateStuff:    [ textfield ]

Form, ProfileSet_B

username:            [ textfield ]
email:               [ textfield ]
anyAnonymousStuff:   [ textfield ]

Problems

1. UserHasProfileSet should relate to User $user and a ProfileSet , which could be an instance of ProfileSet_A or ProfileSet_B . I'd like to have just the field $profileSet instead of $profileSet_A , $profileSet_B , ...

2. I'd like to edit the User and it's ProfileSet (A or B) within the same form.

Question

How to solve the problems in a clean way? I'm open to best-practice alternatives. Maybe I'm thinking in a wrong way.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

If you use Doctrine in your project you can archive this with the Doctrine inheritance , for example with MappedSuperClass :

use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;

/**
 * @ORM\Entity
 * @ORM\Table(name="users")
 */
class User
{
    // other fields

    /**
     * @ORM\OneToOne(targetEntity="ProfileSet")
     */
    private $profile;
}

/**
 * @ORM\Entity
 * @ORM\InheritanceType("JOINED")
 * @ORM\DiscriminatorColumn(name="type", type="string")
 * @ORM\DiscriminatorMap({"a" = "ProfileSet_A", "b" = "ProfileSet_B"})
 * @ORM\Table(name="profile_sets")
 */
class ProfileSet
{
    // common properties
}

/**
 * @ORM\Entity
 * @ORM\Table(name="profile_sets_a")
 */
class ProfileSetA extends ProfileSet
{
    // ...
}

/**
 * @ORM\Entity
 * @ORM\Table(name="profile_sets_b")
 */
class ProfileSetB extends ProfileSet
{
    // ...
}

In this case Doctrine will create 3 tables: profile_sets which will contain common fields and the type of profile, profile_sets_a and profile_sets_b will contain specific fields. When you fetch your User with $profile property, Doctrine will automatically map the needed Object.

As you have only one ProfileSet entry for each User it's not necessary to define extra UserHasProfileSet entity and you can just set OneToOne association directly. But you can do it the same way if you have to.