How to remove an entity when it is used an association class? - php

Question

I've a class user with a one-to-many relationship against ArticleVote which is itself an Association Class (see below).
Here is how my entities looks like:
class User
{
protected $articlesVotes;
}
An user holds an ArticleVote collection.
While an ArticleVote is referenced by a composite primary key based on the UserId and the ArticleId:
class ArticleVote
{
protected $article;
protected $user;
}
Now, let's say I want to remove an ArticleVote from User, naturally I do $user->getArticlesVotes()->removeElement($articleVote); which results in the actual removing of the entity inside the collection but as the ArticleVote is both a relationship and an entity, the row in database is not removed at all.
I know, I can do $em->remove($articleVote); but I wish I could remove it from the collection of the user to bypass the EntityManager, what if I want to remove several $articleVote?
Currently, I create/remove the vote in my User model by passing the Article entity and it's my User entity which creates the ArticleVote object and append it itself, I wish I could have the same behavior for the removal feature.
Any ideas? (oh, and by the way, I already tried with cascade="remove")

Answer 1

I ran to this exact issue yesterday. When setting cascade="remove" this removes the association marked within your UnitOfWork. However to have the items removed from the database you need to mark your $user property in the ArticlesVote Entity to cascade on delete. Like so..
class ArticleVote
{
protected $article;
/**
* #ManyToOne(targetEntity=....
* #ORM\JoinColumn(name="user_id", referencedColumnName="id", onDelete="CASCADE")
*/
protected $user;
}
This will add an "on delete" cascade to the foreign key in your database, and article votes associated with a deleted user will be deleted along with it.