Loading dozens of data fixtures in a neat manner - php

Question

I have a Media entity in an app I'm working on that has associations with several other entities: Speaker, Tag, Category, etc.
In the code below I've shown a fixture I've written to create some test-data. It's obviously very long in order to setup and assign the numerous relations between the data.
public function load(ObjectManager $manager)
{
$videoType = new Mediatype();
$videoType->setName('video');
$videoType->setType('video');
$manager->persist($videoType);
$speaker1 = new Speaker();
$speaker1->setName('Joe Bloggs');
$speaker1->setBiography('Joe Bloggs bio.');
$manager->persist($speaker1);
$category1 = new Category();
$category1->setName('PHP');
$category1->setSlug('php');
$manager->persist($category1);
$tag1 = new Tag();
$tag1->setName('PHPNW');
$tag1->setSlug('phpnw');
$manager->persist($tag1);
$video1 = new Media();
$video1->setMediatype($videoType);
$video1->setSpeakers(
new ArrayCollection(
array(
$speaker1
)
)
);
$video1->setCategories(
new ArrayCollection(
array(
$category1
)
)
);
$video1->setTags(
new ArrayCollection(
array(
$tag1
)
)
);
$video1->setDate(new \Datetime());
$video1->setCreationDate(new \DateTime());
$video1->setTitle('My video about PHP');
$video1->setDescription('A video about PHP!');
$video1->setContent('http://some.video-url.com');
$video1->setLength('20:00:00');
$video1->setRating(2.5);
$video1->setVisits(100);
$video1->setLanguage('EN');
$video1->setHostName('PHP');
$video1->setHostUrl('php');
$video1->setStatus('pub');
$manager->persist($video1);
$manager->flush();
}
Now I want to replace this fixture with real data and load a dozen or so Media entities in one fixture. I could copy and paste it a dozen times and make change the data but that's messy and harder to maintain. Is there an nice way to load numerous entities of the same type like this?

Answer 1

I realised that the doctrine/data-fixtures bundle already does exactly what I wanted.
To do this I load each entity in their own fixture and do $this->addReference('admin-user', $user); to access it from another fixture using $this->getReference('admin-user');
Loading fixtures that are dependencies is easy too:
public function getDependencies()
{
// fixture classes that this fixture is dependent on
return array('MyDataFixtures\MyOtherFixture');
}
So now my fixture looks like this:
public function load(ObjectManager $manager)
{
$video1 = new Media();
$video1->setMediatype($this->getReference('video'));
$video1->setSpeakers(
new ArrayCollection(
array(
$this->getReference('joe-bloggs')
)
)
);
$video1->setCategories(
new ArrayCollection(
array(
$this->getReference('php')
)
)
);
$video1->setTags(
new ArrayCollection(
array(
$this->getReference('phpnw')
)
)
);
$video1->setDate(new \Datetime());
$video1->setCreationDate(new \DateTime());
$video1->setTitle('My video about PHP');
$video1->setDescription('A video about PHP!');
$video1->setContent('http://some.video-url.com');
$video1->setLength('20:00:00');
$video1->setRating(2.5);
$video1->setVisits(100);
$video1->setLanguage('EN');
$video1->setHostName('PHP');
$video1->setHostUrl('php');
$video1->setStatus('pub');
$manager->persist($video1);
$manager->flush();
}
/**
* Load this fixtures dependencies
* #see https://github.com/doctrine/data-fixtures
*
* #return array
*/
public function getDependencies()
{
return array(
'...\LoadMediatypeData',
'...\LoadSpeakerData',
'...\LoadCategoryData',
'...\LoadTagData'
);
}