Symfony 2.5 and own models - php

Question

In Symfony I'm using default ORM Doctrine, but this tool can't give me enough methods to manipulate with different cases. I want to write my own classes and using something like DBAL, just for connections making custom SQL queries and fetch the result. Who can give me some examples? Which classes I should use to make my model layer, extend my functionality.

Answer 1

If you want to write your own SQL query with doctrine you can check that doc page:
http://doctrine-orm.readthedocs.org/en/latest/reference/native-sql.html
but most of the time DQL is more than enough
this is from a project I did, ignore my sql query
//Daily Alerts
$dailyAlertsQuery = $em
->createQuery("
SELECT COUNT (a) AS daily
FROM XXX\xxxBundle\Entity\Alert a
JOIN a.user u
WHERE a.mentionUpdate = '1'
AND u.isActive = '1'
")
->getResult();
$dailyAlerts = new ArrayCollection($dailyAlertsQuery);

Answer 2

As a good practise, you may put all your custom queries (SQL or DQL) in an EntityRepository
Here is an example of a custom EntityRepository
use Doctrine\ORM\EntityRepository;
use \Doctrine\Common\Collections\Criteria;
/**
* RequestRepository
*
*/
class RequestRepository extends EntityRepository
{
public function findByStatus($status = array(), $limit = 5, $orderBy = null)
{
$queryBuilder = $this->_em->createQueryBuilder();
$queryBuilder
->select('n')
->from('BaseBundle:Request', 'n')
->where('n.status IN (:status)')
->setParameter('status', $status)
->setMaxResults($limit);
if (!is_null($orderBy)) {
$queryBuilder->orderBy('n.' . $orderBy[0], $orderBy[1]);
}
$lines = array();
foreach ($queryBuilder->getQuery()->getResult() as $line) {
$lines[] = $line;
}
return $lines;
}
public function getByExpressions($expressions = array(), $limit = 5, $orderBy = null)
{
$criteria = Criteria::create();
if (!empty($expressions)) {
foreach ($expressions as $expression) {
$criteria->andWhere($expression);
}
}
$criteria->setMaxResults($limit);
if (!is_null($orderBy)) {
$criteria->orderBy($orderBy);
}
return $this->matching($criteria);
}
}
And in the Entity code, you define this custom repository as follows:
use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;
/**
* Request
*
* #ORM\Table(name="request")
* #ORM\Entity(repositoryClass="BaseBundle\Repository\RequestRepository")
*/
class Request
{
//Entity code, irrelevant here
}