Tricky query with Doctrine querybuilder

Question

I have a tricky query problem, I use this code to extract the containers that the user has access to (access defined in a many-to-many relation):

    //Fetch the containers
    $repository = $this->getDoctrine()->getRepository('BizTVContainerManagementBundle:Container');
    $query = $repository->createQueryBuilder('c')
        ->innerJoin('c.users','u')
        ->where('c.company = :company')
        ->setParameter('company', $companyId)
        ->orderBy('c.name', 'ASC')
        ->getQuery();
    $containers = $query->getResult();

Now I actually have a hierarchy of 4 levels of permissions - company, geoarea, building and screen. I would like to have it set up so that when a user has permissions on a parent object, the query returned the child object also, without any particular permission being set on the child object.

If I had access to symfony2's excellent entity system, I would be able to put something like

If $entity->getParent() == granted
OR
$entity->getParent()->getParent() == granted
THEN
this is granted also

but in SQL I can't dig down in levels like this, can I?

Answer 1

You can pull in the complete hierarchy in your query:

$query = $repository->createQueryBuilder('company')
    ->leftJoin('company.parent','geoarea')
    ->leftJoin('geoarea.parent','building')
    ->leftJoin('building.parent','screen')

It's not clear to me how you have your permissions stored but within the query you can 'or' together where conditions and check each item in the heirarchy.