Problem making sense of doctrine 2 - doctrine

Question

I'm having a hard time figuring out how to properly use Doctrine 2 with zend framework. I'm reading the docs and basing what I've done so far on that and the zendcasts. The problems actually start when I try to do relational stuff with my db, since I'm not so sure how to use doctrine collections. In my test case, I have an User entity:
class User
{
/**
* #var integer
* #Column (name="id", type="integer", nullable=false)
* #Id
* #GenerateValue(strategy="IDENTIY")
*
*/
private $id;
/**
* #Column(type="string",length=60,nullable=true)
* #var string
*/
private $email;
/**
*
* #param \Doctring\Common\Collections\Collection $property
* #OneToMany(targetEntity="Countries",mappedBy="user", cascade={"persist", "remove"})
*/
private $countries;
public function __get($property)
{
return $this->$property;
}
public function __set($property, $value)
{
$this->$property = $value;
}
}
Which is related to the countries entity:
class Countries {
/**
* #var integer
* #Column (name="id", type="integer", nullable=false)
* #Id
* #GenerateValue(strategy="IDENTIY")
*
*/
private $id;
/**
*
* #var string
* #Column(type="string")
*/
private $countryName;
/**
*
* #var User
* #ManyToOne(targetEntity="User")
* #JoinColumns({
* #JoinColumn(name="user_id", referencedColumnName="id")
* })
*/
private $user;
public function __get($property)
{
return $this->$property;
}
public function __set($property, $value)
{
$this->$property = $value;
}
}
Now I can assign the countries from the controller with something like this:
$p1 = new \Federico\Entity\Countries();
$p1->countryName = 'Argentina';
$p2 = new \Federico\Entity\Countries();
$p2->countryName = 'España';
$u = new \Federico\Entity\User();
$u->firstname = 'John';
$u->lastname = 'Doe';
$u->id = 1;
which would show me this object:
object(Federico\Entity\User)[109]
private 'id' => int 1
private 'email' => null
private 'countries' =>
array
0 =>
object(Federico\Entity\Countries)[107]
private 'id' => null
private 'countryName' => string 'Argentina' (length=9)
private 'user' => null
1 =>
object(Federico\Entity\Countries)[108]
private 'id' => null
private 'countryName' => string 'España' (length=7)
private 'user' => null
public 'firstname' => string 'John' (length=4)
public 'lastname' => string 'Doe' (length=3)
If you pay attention to this, you'll see that the user property is set to null in the country objects. I don't understand if this is supposed to happen like this or not. Also, since users will be allowed to choose the countries from a checkbox list, and they'll be able to choose more than one country,...shouldn't the countries somehow be stored in the Db?

Answer 1

I don't see where you assign country to a user in your code. Anyway, you need to do two things:
Initialize $countries variable as a new Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection in User constructor.
Manually connect country with user:
public function addCountry(Country $c)
{
if (!$this->countries->contains($c)) {
$this->countries->add($c);
$c->user = $user;
}
}

Answer 2

In doctrine 2 the use of the magic getters and setters is discouraged. As you can see they can cause problems for managing associations. Below is an example of how to manage the association that you have in your User entity.
namespace Whatever/Your/Namespace/Is;
use \Doctrine\Common\ArrayCollection;
class User
{
/**
* #Column (type="integer")
* #Id
* #var integer
*/
private $id;
/**
* #OneToMany(targetEntity="Country", mappedBy="user", cascade={"persist", "remove"})
* #var ArrayCollection
private $countries;
public function __construct()
{
$this->countries = new ArrayCollection();
}
public function getCountries()
{
return $this->countries;
}
public function setCountry(Country $country)
{
$this->country[] = $country;
$country->setUser($this);
return $this;
}
public function removeCountry(Country $country)
{
return $this->country->removeElement($country);
}
}
and for Country
class Country
{
/**
* #Id
* #Column(type="integer")
* #var integer
*/
private $id;
/**
* #Column(length=100)
* #var string
*/
private $country_name;
/**
* #ManyToOne(targetEntity="User", inversedBy="countries")
* #var User
*/
private $user;
public function setUser(User $user)
{
$this->user = $user;
return $this;
}
public function getUser()
{
return $this->user;
}
// ...
}