How to cascade deletions with Doctrine 1.2? - doctrine

Question

I have been struggling with defining cascade behavior in Doctrine ORM.
According to the documentation, one is supposed to use onDelete: CASCADE for database-level cascade (which is what I am trying to achieve here).
A complete example may be seen on the Symfony tutorial.
However, all such cascade specifications are ignored in my schema.
Here is the relevant excerpt:
Advancement:
columns:
association_id:
type: integer(4)
notnull: true
task_id:
type: integer(4)
notnull: true
state:
type: enum
values: ['todo', 'current', 'done', 'cancelled']
notnull: true
relations:
Association:
class: Association
local: association_id
foreignType: one
onDelete: CASCADE
Task:
class: Task
local: task_id
foreignType: one
onDelete: CASCADE
Of course, the Task and Association tables are defined correctly. I won't post them here in the first place to avoid a too long question, but please ask if that seems necessary.
Here is the generated SQL (linebreaks mine):
CREATE TABLE advancement
(id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT,
association_id INTEGER NOT NULL,
task_id INTEGER NOT NULL,
state VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL);
Not a trace of a CASCADE (nor a REFERENCES, by the way…). Of course, cascading does not work, and I had to implement it manually by altering the default backend actions.
Does anyone know what I am doing wrong here?

Answer 1

I think doctrine will shut up about the fact that your RDBMS (is it MySQL?) does not support cascades if it doesn't. This is the case if you use MySQL with the MyISAM storage engine (which does not support REFERENCES either, by the way...). If I were you, I'd try to create a cascade directly with your RDBMS client, just to check whether it is possible or not.