Creating Entities in Symfony2 without Doctrine

Question

My company keeps the database administration and development in a separate department and for my Symfony2 app I am only allowed to interact with the DB via a service API. This means I can't use Doctrine ORM or even php pdo.

I basically will have to build my own abstraction layer. I have been searching the internet all day and haven't seen anything about best practices for creating my own basic entity abastraction layer for Symfony2. I can't even find information on using anything but Doctrine.

Does anyone have any suggestions or know of any resources for best practices on doing this for symfony2?

Answer 1

Symfony is model independent (There's no 'M' from MVC). Notice that Doctrine or Propel are separate projects integrated with Symfony. They're not part of the framework.

I think you should just implement client library for your API which would be decoupled from the framework (you might even use it in plain php scripts or other framework).

Step 2 would be integrating you library with Symfony. It would probably include creating a bundle and appropriate service definitions. Looking at DoctrineBundle might give you some ideas.

Answer 2

I did it following way:

• First of all I've defined Entities, but without ORM stuff in there.

• Then I've created Service Container classes which were retrieving data from API. http://symfony.com/doc/current/book/service_container.html

• Third I've used something like Data Transformers to transform data fetched from API to my Symfony Entities. http://symfony.com/doc/current/cookbook/form/data_transformers.html

Please feel free to contact me for more details.