Metadata

Because Doctrine entities do not extend any smart ancestor class, we have to tell Doctrine how to map the data from the database into the entity. There are multiple ways of doing this.

Attributes

The attributes driver requires php 8 or above. It searches the entities in the app folder, but you can change this to whatever folder (or multiple folders) you like. Attributes means, that you will use attributes to indicate the column mappings.

namespace App\Entities;

use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping\Column;
use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping\Entity;
use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping\GeneratedValue;
use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping\Id;
use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping\Table;

#[Entity]
#[Table(name: "articles")]
class Article
{
    #[Id, Column(type: "integer"), GeneratedValue()]
    protected $id;

    #[Column(type: "string")]
    protected $title;

    public function getId()
    {
        return $this->id;
    }

    public function getTitle()
    {
        return $this->title;
    }

    public function setTitle($title)
    {
        $this->title = $title;
    }
}

More about the attributes driver: https://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-orm/en/2.11/reference/attributes-reference.html

XML

Another option is to us XML mappings. It’s better to change the

meta data paths to something like config_path('doctrine_orm_metadata').

App.Entities.Article.dcm.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<doctrine-mapping xmlns="http://doctrine-project.org/schemas/orm/doctrine-mapping"
      xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
      xsi:schemaLocation="http://doctrine-project.org/schemas/orm/doctrine-mapping
                          http://raw.github.com/doctrine/doctrine2/master/doctrine-mapping.xsd">

    <entity name="App\Entities\Article" table="articles">
        <id name="id" type="integer" column="id">
            <generator strategy="AUTO"/>
            <sequence-generator sequence-name="tablename_seq" allocation-size="100" initial-value="1" />
        </id>
        <field name="title" column="title" type="string" />
    </entity>
</doctrine-mapping>

More information about XML mappings: https://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-orm/en/2.6/reference/xml-mapping.html

Config files

This package adds another option, which leverages Laravel’s config system. In addition to setting meta, this also requires setting mapping_file. You could for example create a config/mappings.php file to provide mapping information. Here is an example of setting the meta and mapping_file config properties inside of config/doctrine.php to use config file-based metadata.

return [
    'managers' => [
        'default' => [
            'meta'       => env('DOCTRINE_METADATA', 'config'),
            'mapping_file' => 'mappings',

The array structure in config/mappings.php:

return [
    'App\Entities\Article' => [
        'type'   => 'entity',
        'table'  => 'articles',
        'id'     => [
            'id' => [
                'type'     => 'integer',
                'generator' => [
                    'strategy' => 'auto'
                ]
            ],
        ],
        'fields' => [
            'title' => [
                'type' => 'string'
            ]
        ]
    ]
];

Static PHP

When you change the meta data driver setting to static_php, your entities will expect a loadMetadata method.

class Article {

protected $id; protected $title;

public static function loadMetadata(DoctrineORMMappingClassMetadata $metadata) {

$metadata->mapField(array(

‘id’ => true, ‘fieldName’ => ‘id’, ‘type’ => ‘integer’

));

$metadata->mapField(array(

‘fieldName’ => ‘title’, ‘type’ => ‘string’

));

}

More on the StaticPHP driver: https://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-orm/en/2.6/reference/php-mapping.html

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