Doctrine Associations in symfony - php

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