Symfony2: get Doctrine in a generic PHP class - php

Question

In a Symfony2 project, when you use a Controller, you can access Doctrine by calling getDoctrine() on this, i.e.:
$this->getDoctrine();
In this way, I can access the repository of such a Doctrine Entity.
Suppose to have a generic PHP class in a Symfony2 project. How can I retrieve Doctrine ?
I suppose that there is such a service to get it, but I don't know which one.

Answer 1

You can register this class as a service and inject whatever other services into it. Suppose you have GenericClass.php as follows:
class GenericClass
{
public function __construct()
{
// some cool stuff
}
}
You can register it as service (in your bundle's Resources/config/service.yml|xml usually) and inject Doctrine's entity manager into it:
services:
my_mailer:
class: Path/To/GenericClass
arguments: [doctrine.orm.entity_manager]
And it'll try to inject entity manager to (by default) constructor of GenericClass. So you just have to add argument for it:
public function __construct($entityManager)
{
// do something awesome with entity manager
}
If you are not sure what services are available in your application's DI container, you can find out by using command line tool: php app/console container:debug and it'll list all available services along with their aliases and classes.

Answer 2

After checking the symfony2 docs i figured out how to pass your service
in a custom method to break the default behavior.
Rewrite your configs like this:
services:
my_mailer:
class: Path/To/GenericClass
calls:
- [anotherMethodName, [doctrine.orm.entity_manager]]
So, the Service is now available in your other method.
public function anotherMethodName($entityManager)
{
// your magic
}
The Answer from Ondrej is absolutely correct, I just wanted to add this piece of the puzzle to this thread.