Doctrine: Can I flush only one class of entities?

Question

I like the general idea of passing Doctrine repositories as services in Symfony2 and avoiding passing EntityManager. However, while it's fine when reading data, the saving logic becomes a bit problematic here.

Let's take this as a reference: http://php-and-symfony.matthiasnoback.nl/2014/05/inject-a-repository-instead-of-an-entity-manager/, but with a change separating persisting and flushing:

class DoctrineORMCustomerRepository extends EntityRepository implements CustomerRepository
{
    public function persist(Customer $customer)
    {
        $this->_em->persist($customer);
    }

    public function flush()
    {
        $this->_em->flush();
    }
}

The problem is you flush in a particular repository all changes in all entities.

Now, is it possible to flush just one class of entities? (possibly cascading to dependent entities), so I could basically do something like:

foreach ($customers as $customer) {
    $this->customerRepository->persist($customer);
}

$this->customerRepository->flush();

I considered something like:

$this->_em->flush(getUnitOfWork()->getIdentityMap()[$this->_entityName]);

But I must have misunderstood something, because it doesn't work.

EDIT: Yes, I'm aware I can do $this->_em->flush($entity), but doing this one by one is suboptimal. I even know I can do $this->_em->flush($arrayOfEntities), but to make the "foreach" example work this way I'd have to keep track of all the persisted entities in the repository duplicating some Doctrine internals.

Answer 1

Try this:

$em->flush($entity);

Then doctrine only will flush $entity, ignoring any other.