Polymorphic association to different owner objects in Doctrine 2

Question

is it possible to use kind of polymorphic association to different owner objects in Doctrine 2? I mean that for example ImageGroup entity is owned by different entities: Article, Album, Post, Comment, etc. So there should be "ownerId" and "ownerType" attributes in ImageGroup table, where "ownerType" is discriminator.

I am already using Class Table Inheritance and also Superclass mapping on other object relationships in my project, but any of them suits for this problem, if I am correct. Because in these situations referred objects are inherited.

I have read answers to polymorphic associations here, but I found no answer to my example.

In my example is no inheritance at all. Any help, please? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

What you are looking for is the strategy pattern, which basically allows you to have a weak link between your objects and the ones you want to reference, such as ['name' => 'EntityName', 'identifier' => 123].