symfony2 filtering on related entities with entities

Question

I have searched google for hours now and I can't seem to find the answer i'm looking for. In Symfony2, I am attempting to use the Criteria::create() and filter on a season and its not working. Here's the full explanation:

I have 4 Entitys: User, UserPolicy, Role and Season. UserPolicy implements the RoleInterface and User implements the UserInterface.

User.php

class User implements UserInterface, \Serializable {

    /**
     * @OneToMany(targetEntity="UserPolicy", mappedBy="User", cascade={"persist", "remove"})
     */
    private $Polocies;

}

UserPolicy.php

class UserPolicy Implements RoleInterface
{
    /**
     * @Id()
     * @Column(type="integer")
     * @GeneratedValue(strategy="AUTO")
     */
    private $id;

    /**
     * @ManyToOne(targetEntity="User", inversedBy="Polocies")
     * @JoinColumn(name="userid", referencedColumnName="id")
     */
    private $User;

    /**
     * @ManyToOne(targetEntity="Role")
     * @JoinColumn(name="roleid", referencedColumnName="id")
     */
    private $Role;

    /**
     * @ManyToOne(targetEntity="Season")
     * @JoinColumn(name="seasonid", referencedColumnName="id")
     */
    private $Season;
}

Role.php

class Role{

    /**
     * @Id
     * @Column(type="integer")
     * @GeneratedValue(strategy="AUTO")
     */
    private $id;

    /**
     * @Column(name="role", type="string", length=50)
     */
    private $Role;

    /**
     * @Column(name="label", type="string", length=50)
     */
    private $Label;

    /**
     * @ManyToOne(targetEntity="Role")
     * @JoinColumn(name="parentId", referencedColumnName="id", nullable=true)
     */
    private $Parent;
}

Note the $Season variable on the UserPolicy.

Each year there will be a new season, and users will get a new set of policies, keeping the previous seasons policies.

In User.php, I need to call getRoles() which works and i can get the UserPolicies which have the roles attached to them and that works too.

The problem is introduced when i need to filter on the Seasons. I found the Criteria class:

$criteria = Criteria::create()
            ->where(Criteria::expr()->eq("Season", "1"));

But because Season is an object, I'm getting the error

Cannot match on AppBundle\Entity\UserPolicy::Season with a non-object value. Matching objects by id is not compatible with matching on an in-memory collection, which compares objects by reference.

How do I fetch the Season Object if i'm not supposed to be able to load other data in the User Entity? I don't know how to pass the Season Object. I even created a service to access the season object, but I can't access the get() function inside the Entity. HELP!

Answer 1

I found this question which describes a similar issue to yours. It's not possible to use the criteria in the way you described.

So there are three solutions:

1. Fetch the entire collection and then filter it by season like in the question I mentioned earlier .

2. Create a repository method to fetch user policies by season id.

3. First fetch the season, and then use it in the default findBy() method of the entity repository.

Hope this helps.