Doctrine Results Missing Entity - php

Question

I've been trying to figure this out for a while now. Let's start with the basic information, I have a client table and a contact table. The client table has a OneToMany and OneToOne relation with contact
class Client
{
/**
* #var int
* #Id
* #Column(type="integer", nullable=false, unique=true, options={"comment":"Auto incrementing client_id of each client"})
* #GeneratedValue
*/
protected $pid;
/**
* #OneToMany(targetEntity="Contact", mappedBy="client")
* #JoinColumn(name="contact_id", referencedColumnName="pid")
* #var Contact[]
*/
protected $contact;
/**
* #OneToOne(targetEntity="Contact")
* #JoinColumn(name="defaultcontact_id", referencedColumnName="pid", nullable=true)
* #var Contact
*/
protected $default_contact;
The contact table has a ManyToOne relation with Client:
class Contact
{
/**
* #var int
* #Id
* #Column(type="integer", nullable=false, unique=true, options={"comment":"Auto incrementing user_id of each user"})
* #GeneratedValue
*/
protected $pid;
/**
* #ManyToOne(targetEntity="Client", inversedBy="contact")
* #JoinColumn(name="client_id", referencedColumnName="pid")
*/
protected $client;
Here's the query that I've been using:
$qb = $entityManager->createQueryBuilder();
$qb->select("cn as contact", "cl as client")
->from('DB\Contact', 'cn')
->innerJoin('cn.client', 'cl')
->where(
$qb->expr()->andX(
$qb->expr()->eq('cl.client_name', '?1'),
$qb->expr()->eq('cn.pid', '?2')
)
)
->setParameter(1, $client)
->setParameter(2, $contact);
try
{
$result = $qb->getQuery()->getOneOrNullResult();
}
I want both the contact and the client. And this is where I'm having problems: array_keys($result) ends up outputting:
Array
(
[0] => contact
)
I wanted something like this:
[0] => contact
[1] => client
In other words, the Client Entity is missing. Flipping the SELECT FROM from the Contact to the Client repository yielded the reverse situation, contact was missing.
I've checked over the previous code, while entityManager was reused from the login step, this is the first time the Client and Contact repository are accessed so I don't believe it's a caching problem.
Here's the SQL statement being executed:
Executing SQL:
SELECT c0_.pid AS pid0, c0_.caller AS caller1, c0_.address_1 AS address_12, c0_.address_2 AS address_23,
c0_.unit AS unit4, c0_.city AS city5, c0_.state AS state6, c0_.zip_code AS zip_code7, c0_.phone AS phone8,
c0_.email AS email9, c0_.is_active AS is_active10, c0_.date_created AS date_created11,
c0_.date_last_modified AS date_last_modified12, c1_.pid AS pid13, c1_.client_name AS client_name14,
c1_.is_active AS is_active15, c1_.date_created AS date_created16, c1_.date_last_modified AS date_last_modified17,
c0_.client_id AS client_id18, c0_.created_by_id AS created_by_id19, c0_.last_modified_by_id AS last_modified_by_id20,
c1_.defaultcontact_id AS defaultcontact_id21, c1_.created_by_id AS created_by_id22,
c1_.last_modified_by_id AS last_modified_by_id23
FROM contacts c0_
INNER JOIN clients c1_ ON c0_.client_id = c1_.pid
WHERE c1_.client_name= ? AND c0_.pid = ?
As a sidenote, if I alter the select so that the missing entity accesses a specific column, I'll get the desired values.
e.g.
$qb->select("cn as contact", "cl.pid as client")
->from('RGAServ\DB\Contact', 'cn')
will have the following array_keys($result):
Array
(
[0] => contact
[1] => client
)
So I can assure you that the client does exist in the database and it should be properly attached to the contact, it's just that under the first select statement where I want the whole entity and not just one column, the entity ends up not being pushed into the result array.
Why is this? Are there too many columns in the Sql statement? Am I forgetting something in the annotations?

Answer 1

First: You can't have different entities in the resulting array: every row in the result must be in the same format.
Second: If you examine your SQL query closely you'll notice that the one row that is returned contains both the contact (c0_) and the client (c1_).
Try executing the SQL query in the database to see the result.

Answer 2

After looking through a bunch of stack overflow questions, I've come to the following conclusion: It looks like this is how doctrine handles "Fetch Joins".
The big clue comes from here:
Doctrine Regular vs Fetch join
With supporting evidence for this behavior's existence coming from:
Doctrine - entities not being fetched
Doctrine join bypass lazy loading
Doctrine2 query with select on multiple entities from different Symfony2 bundles
More specifically, this quote from the doctrine documentation starts to make sense (http://doctrine-orm.readthedocs.org/en/latest/reference/dql-doctrine-query-language.html#joins):
When Doctrine hydrates a query with fetch-join it returns the class in
the FROM clause on the root level of the result array. In the previous
example an array of User instances is returned and the address of each
user is fetched and hydrated into the User#address variable. If you
access the address Doctrine does not need to lazy load the association
with another query.
In layman's terms, during a FETCH JOIN, contact (or client if I'm SELECTing FROM the client repository) is designated as the root entity. Whatever is found for Client will then be pushed into the contact's $client variable to be retrieved afterwards using a getter accessor.
The retrieval itself will not need a follow-up database query to fetch the client entity. I'll need to do a little testing, but it looks like this behavior was for the situation when multiple results are returned during the join. Instead of cluttering up the results, they're organized under an intuitive location.
In other words, I had the wrong expectations and was looking in the wrong spot. The client entity did indeed come back, but it wasn't placed in results. It was filed under contact. Retrieving it separately is, therefore, a given but at least it won't need another database call.
At least now, I believe I know why when I had Client in the from field, I was getting one specific contact instead of all of them when I tried to use the getContact() accessor.