Symfony2 and Doctrine: OneToMany relation duplicates data in the table

Question

I have two tables: articles and emails. The emails table will contain emails related to the specific articles, for example:

id    |  article_id |     email
1     |      1      |  [email protected]
2     |      1      |  [email protected]
3     |      2      |  [email protected]
4     |      2      |  [email protected]

Etc....

There is a relation between article_id and the id from the articles table.

In my entity, I have this code:

class Articles
{ 
    ....
     /**
      * @ORM\OneToMany(targetEntity="\Acme\DemoBundle\Entity\Emails", mappedBy="articles")
      */
      private $emails_rel; 

    ...
}

class Emails
{ 
    /**
     * @ORM\ManyToOne(targetEntity="\Acme\DemoBundle\Entity\Articles", inversedBy="emails_rel", cascade={"all"})
     * @ORM\JoinColumn(name="article_id", referencedColumnName="id")
     **/
    private $articles; 
}

In my controller, i am doing some tests where I will persist or not some entities. At the end, I am doing a flush

$em->flush(); 

And the strange behaviour is that in my Emails table, the data is duplicated as soon as I am doing the flush. When testing the entity manager with

$em->getUnitOfWork()->getScheduledEntityInsertions()

I am getting an empty array.

Any idea why? Thank you very much.

EDIT:

Here is the test:

$articl = new Articles();
$articl = $em->createQuery("SELECT p FROM Acme\DemoBundle\Entity\Articles p WHERE p.bMailToMatch = 1")->getResult();
$nb = count($articl);

// BECAUSE I WILL WORK WITH A LOTS OF ENTRIES - PREVENT MEMORY OVERFLOW
$em->clear();    

if(isset( $articl )) {
    foreach($articl as $i => $art) {
        $array_emails = null;

        $art_emails = $art->getEmailsRel();
        foreach ($art_emails as $e) {
            $array_emails[] = $e->getEmail();
        }

        $art_id = $art->getId ();
        echo "\n\n---------- $i ----------\n " . $art->getDoi ();

        // TAKES ARTICLE WITH ZERO EMAIL
        if (!isset($array_emails) ) {
            $updated_article = $em->getRepository('AcmeDemoBundle:Articles')->findOneBy(array( 'id' => ($art_id)    )) ; 
            // Because of the clearing of the entity manager
            echo"\n\n$art_id Article DOI \n".$updated_article->getDoi();
            echo "\n==>Put the BMailToMatch's flag to 0";
            $updated_article->setBMailToMatch(0);
            $em->persist($updated_article);
        }
        else {
            echo " ==> ok\n";
        }

        if (($i % 3) == 0) {
            $em->flush();
            $em->clear();
        }
    }

    $em->flush();
    $em->clear();
}

return new Response ( "\n\nFinished!!\n" );             

Answer 1

I didn't caught your problem before I reproduced it but now it's a kind of obvious. Your problem comes from the use of the clear method. Actually, if you clear your entity manager, it forgets their existence and will persist them as new ones.

If you have performance issue, you can limit the number of items you deal with and do it recursively until you're done.

I hope it helped you ;)

Good Luck

Cheers

Answer 2

If I am reading this correctly then a simplified version of the code would be as follows:

$articles_with_mail_to_match_true = $em->createQuery("SELECT p FROM Acme\DemoBundle\Entity\Articles p WHERE p.bMailToMatch = 1")->getResult();

foreach($articles_with_mail_to_match_true as $i => $article_with_mail_to_match_true) 
{
    if ( count($article_with_mail_to_match_true->getEmailsArray()) < 1 ) 
    {
        $article_copy_object = $em->getRepository('AcmeDemoBundle:Articles')->findOneBy(array( 'id' => ($article_with_mail_to_match_true->getId()) )) ; 

        $article_copy_object->setBMailToMatch(0);

        $em->persist($article_copy_object);
    }

    if (($i % 3) == 0) {
        $em->flush();
    }
}

$em->flush();

It seems the only thing you are persisting is the $article_copy_object after changing the the one value. If that is the case then either A. there is something wrong in your entity we can not see in this code example or B. it is happening elsewhere and not during this operation.