How to set a date in Doctrine 2?

Question

I have a field named "birthday" in doctrine entity.

I would like to create an object to add to database using doctrine.

Inside the controller :

$name = "John Alex"; $birthday = "11-11-90"; $student = new Student(); $student->setName($name); $student->setBirthday(strtotime($birthday); ... 

but when I try to persist I get this error

Fatal error: Call to a member function format() on a non-object in /Library/WebServer/Documents/Symfony/vendor/doctrine-dbal/lib/Doctrine/DBAL/Types/DateType.php on line 44 

Edit:

My entity:

/**  * @var string $name  *  * @ORM\Column(name="name", type="string", length=255)  */ private $name;  /**  * @var date $birthday  *  * @ORM\Column(name="birthday", type="date", nullable=true)  */ private $birthday;  /**  * Set birthday  *  * @param date $birthday  */ public function setBirthday($birthday) {     $this->birthday = $birthday; }  /**  * Get birthday  *  * @return date   */ public function getBirthday() {     return $this->birthday; } 

Answer 1

$name = "John Alex"; $birthday = "11-11-1990"; // I changed this $student = new Student(); $student->setName($name); $student->setBirthday(new \DateTime($birthday)); // setting a new date instance // ...