Doctrine Associations in symfony

Question

so I have been working with Symfony for a while but there is one thing that bothers. It's about Doctrine Associations . The thing is that I am trying to achieve a user friend invites and relations and there is a page that the user can see the invitations he sent and the ones that are pending.

EDIT: I made it happen using Many-To-One/One-To-Many associations. However My question is - Are Doctrine Associations the correct way of doing that.

My User Entity

class User implements UserInterface
{ 
private $id;
/**
 * @ORM\Column(name="first_name", type="string", length=30)
 *
 * @Assert\NotBlank(message="First name cannot be a blank field", groups={"register"})
 * @Assert\Length(min="3", max="30", groups={"register"})
 */

/**
 * @ORM\Column(type="string", length=50)
 *
 * @Assert\NotBlank(message="Username cannot be a blank field", groups={"register"})
 * @Assert\Length(min="7", max="50", groups={"register"})
 */
private $username;

/**
 * @ORM\Column(type="string", length=255)
 *
 * @Assert\Length(min="7", max="50", groups={"register"})
 */
private $password;



/**
 * @ORM\OneToMany(targetEntity="App\Entity\UserInvitation", mappedBy="inviterId", orphanRemoval=true)
 */
private $userInvitations;

/**
 * @ORM\OneToMany(targetEntity="App\Entity\UserInvitation", mappedBy="invitedId", orphanRemoval=true)
 */
private $pendingUserInvitations;

//getters and setters 

My UserInvitation Entity

class UserInvitation
{
/**
 * @ORM\Id()
 * @ORM\GeneratedValue()
 * @ORM\Column(type="integer")
 */
private $id;

/**
 * @ORM\ManyToOne(targetEntity="App\Entity\User", inversedBy="userInvitations")
 * @ORM\JoinColumn(name="inviter_id", nullable=false)
 */
private $inviterId;

/**
 * @ORM\ManyToOne(targetEntity="App\Entity\User", inversedBy="pendingUserInvitations")
 * @ORM\JoinColumn(name="invited_id", nullable=false)
 */
private $invitedId;

/**
 * @ORM\Column(type="boolean")
 */
private $status;

This is my database.

Answer 1

The relationships is the right way to do it although on the entity I would use the following:

class UserInvitation
{
/**
 * @ORM\Id()
 * @ORM\GeneratedValue()
 * @ORM\Column(type="integer")
 */
private $id;

/**
 * @ORM\ManyToOne(targetEntity="App\Entity\User", inversedBy="userInvitations")
 * @ORM\JoinColumn(name="inviter_id", nullable=false)
 */
private $inviter;

/**
 * @ORM\ManyToOne(targetEntity="App\Entity\User", inversedBy="pendingUserInvitations")
 * @ORM\JoinColumn(name="invited_id", nullable=false)
 */
private $invitee;

/**
 * @ORM\Column(type="boolean")
 */
private $status;

Then you would getInviter() or setInviter(). Basically think that you are saving the related object to the entity and not the related field