Getting a "true" object from a proxy object in doctrine2

Question

Doctrine uses proxy objects to represent related objects in order to facilitate lazy loading. This is a really cool feature, but its causing an issue with something I am trying to accomplish.

I have customized my user object so that they are all required to be related to a different object, which I will call city. This relationship is working fine.

I have a form that my user fills out to generate another object, street. Street is also related to the city object. Instead of having my user select the city when they fill out the form, I want to automatically set it before I persist the object to my database.

I tried using $event->setCity($user->getCity()), but since $user->getCity() returns a proxy object, this generates an error. Is there a function I can call from the proxy object to get the real one?

Note: I am aware I can create a custom query with a join to force doctrine to actually load the related object, but since this is the user (using FOSUserBundle) that would be difficult to do properly.

Answer 1

This is unlikely to help in the specific instance for the question, since you're relying on a third-party module, but you can prevent the lazy loading by setting the "fetch mode" for your entity to "EAGER".

User:     ManyToOne:         city:             fetch: EAGER 

This can also be handled by annotations:

@ManyToOne(targetEntity="city", fetch="EAGER") @JoinColumn(name="city", referencedColumnName="id") 

See http://docs.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-orm/en/latest/reference/annotations-reference.html#annref-manytoone

None of the other answers I've seen here worked for me.

Answer 2

Edit: As mention by @flu this approach don't return the "true" object. However it can be useful in case if you need the data from the object. Then, you can just get the real object from ObjectManager by some of identity.

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We can use __load() method from Proxy interface

$proxyObject->__load();