Cascaded persist not working (Doctrine ORM + Symfony 2)

Question

I started working with symfony several months ago and there is one thing keeps bothering me all the time. It is when I have a one-to-many relationship in Doctrine and I try to insert something into the database. Here's an example:

Broker.orm.yml

Acme\DemoBundle\Entity\Broker:
    type: entity
    table: brokers
    repositoryClass: BrokerRepository
    id:
        id:
            type: integer
            generator: { strategy: AUTO }
    fields:
        name:
            type: string
            length: 255
        slug:
            type: string
            length: 64
    oneToMany:
        accountTypes:
            targetEntity: Acme\DemoBundle\Entity\AccountType
            mappedBy: broker
            cascade: ["persist"]

AccountType.orm.yml

Acme\DemoBundle\Entity\AccountType:
    type: entity
    table: account_types
    repositoryClass: AccountTypeRepository
    id:
        id:
            type: integer
            generator: { strategy: AUTO }
    fields:
        name:
            type: string
            length: 255
        slug:
            type: string
            length: 64
    manyToOne:
        broker:
            targetEntity: Acme\DemoBundle\Entity\Broker
            inversedBy: accountTypes
            joinColumn:
                name: broker_id
                referencedColumn: id

Then is try to save it to the database like this.

$accountType = new AccountType();
$accountType->setName("blabla");
// additional data to accountType

$broker->addAccountType($accountType);

$em->persist($broker);
$em->flush();

The strange thing is that it works prefrectly with only one tiny problem. Broker is updated, and AccountType is inserted into the database but the accountType doesn't have any relations with the Broker. In other words, when I check in the database the broker_id fields reamains untouched and contains NULL.

If I add $accountType->setBroker($broker) manually, it works. But I started to use Sonata Admin Bundle where there is much more complicated to do this and I don't really need a complex admin system. So I just want a fast development on it and without this "feature" it's nearly impossible.

And anyways, if I add something to a collection of an Object, it should know which object is its parent, right? :)

Thanks for your help in advance!

Answer 1

class Broker
{
    public function addAccountType($accountType)
    {
        $this->accountTypes[] = $accountType;

        // *** This is what you are missing ***
        $accountType->setBroker($this);