Clone entity and all related entities in CakePHP 3 - php

Question

In my CakePHP 3 app, I have a somewhat elaborate tree of entities that I need to clone and save.
The root of the structure is a Questionnaire, a Questionnaire hasMany Questions, each Question hasMany Fields, etc. (it goes deeper). Now I want the user to be able to define a new questionnaire by copying an old one. Then they can change whatever they need.
I can get a dump of what I need to copy by using $questionnaire->$this->Questionnaires->get($id) with the appropriate contain fields. Is there a clever way to save this as a bunch of new entities while preserving the data and the structure between them?

Answer 1

I think the best possible way would be following work flow:
Get object you want to clone
Go through the collection and remove all ID's
Convert to array and use that in $this->Questionnaires->newEntity($arrayData, ['associated' => ['Questions', '...']]);
Now save the new entity with all the related data you want to keep
AFAIK there's no "smarter" way of cloning an entity with associations in Cake 3 :-)

Answer 2

You could also use this plugin. You only have to configure the behavior and it gives you other functionalities, like setting default values or appending text to some field.

Answer 3

use EntityInteface toArray() to get all its fields:
$newEtity = $someTable->newEntity($oldEtity->toArray());
unset($newDevice->created);
unset($newDevice->id);
$someTable->save($newEntity);

Answer 4

$original = $this->Table->get($id)->toArray();
$copy = $this->Table->newEntity();
$copy = $this->Table->patchEntity($copy, $original);
unset($copy['id']);
// Unset or modify all others what you need
$this->Table->save($copy);
Work perfectly like this :)

Answer 5

Here's the way I did it when I needed something similar (adapted to the Questionnaire example):
// load the models
$this->loadModel('Questionnaire');
$this->loadModel('Questions');
// get the questions to questionnaire association - will need the PK name
$qAssoc = $this->{'Questions'}->associations()->get('Questionnaire');
// get the existing entity to copy
$existingEntity = $this->{'Questionnaire'}->get($id, [
'contain' => ['Questions'],
]);
// clean up the existing entity
$existingEntity->unsetProperty($this->{'Questionnaire'}->getPrimaryKey());
$existingEntity->unsetProperty('created');
$existingEntity->unsetProperty('modified');
// clean up the associated records of the existing entity
foreach ($existingEntity->questions as &$q) {
$q->unsetProperty($this->{'Questions'}->getPrimaryKey());
$q->unsetProperty($qAssoc->getForeignKey());
}
// create a new entity and patch it with source data
$newEntity = $this->{'Questionnaire'}->patchEntity(
$this->{'Questionnaire'}->newEntity(),
$existingEntity->toArray()
);
// save the new entity
$result = $this->{'Questionnaire'}->save($existingEntity);
References:
https://api.cakephp.org/3.0/class-Cake.ORM.Entity.html
https://api.cakephp.org/3.0/class-Cake.ORM.Table.html