Storing "CASE WHEN" condition in Doctrine2 entity

Question

As of Doctrine 2.1, the CASE WHEN statement is supported but there isn't a lot of documentation on it. My goal is to set a boolean value to tell if a photo has been favorited by a user:

       ->addSelect("CASE WHEN f.photo is NULL THEN false ELSE true END as is_favorited")
       ->leftJoin("p.favorites", 'f', 'WITH', 'f.owner = :viewer')
       ->orderBy("p.date_posted", "DESC")
       ->setParameters(array("owner" => $owner, "viewer" => $viewer));

But because my entities are being transformed into json by JMSSerializer, I would like to set the CASE WHEN result as a property on the entity.

        ->addSelect("CASE WHEN f.photo is NULL THEN false ELSE true END as p.is_favorited")

But unforunately Doctrine does not seem to like this:

[Syntax Error] line 0, col 65: Error: Expected Doctrine\ORM\Query\Lexer::T_FROM, got '.'

Is there an alternative to setting DQL created properties on an entity?

Answer 1

There is no way to set property value in query directly. Instead, you can add not-mapped field into entity, and then walk through results and set it. In this case JMSSerializer serialize that field and you can set necessary type and other meta information on it.