Let’s say I have a model “Payment” and it has a one-to-many relationship with “Person” (i.e. one person has many payments, or the payment table has a foreign key “person_id”). I want the list of payments sortable by “last_name”.

In generator.yml:

 config:
  fields:
   last_name: { is_real: true }
...
  list:
    display:  [id, date, amount, last_name]

Let’s update our Payment.class.php file with methods to fetch the person’s last name.

class Payment extends BasePayment
{
...
  public function getLastName()
  {
    return $this->Person->last_name;
  }

Now, if you reload your generated list view, you’ll see the column heading for last_name has been converted to a link. Now, we’ll have to add this foreign column (last_name) to our query and also add some logic to sort by the proper column when necessary.

Let’s add a custom table method to our list query, adding another line to generator.yml:

...
config:
  list:
  ...
    table_method: doSelectJoinPerson

Let’s add the new method to our PaymentTable.class.php:

class PaymentTable extends Doctrine_Table
{
  ...  
  public static function doSelectJoinPerson($query)
  {
    $rootAlias = $query->getRootAlias();
 
    return $query->select($rootAlias . '.*, p.last_name')
      ->leftJoin($rootAlias . '.Person p');
  }
}

The table_method parameter in our list configuration is used to define which method should be executed on our model’s table when it fetches results from the database. Our main model will always have an alias “r” as defined in the symfony/doctrine source code (check out sfFormFilterDoctrine::doBuildQuery()).

We now need to pass the table alias for our foreign table (in this case, we used ‘p’ for Person) into our sort query if ‘last_name’ is given as our sort parameter. Let’s override the addSortQuery($query) in our actions class:

class paymentActions extends autoPaymentActions
{
...
  protected function addSortQuery($query)
  {
    if (array(null, null) == ($sort = $this->getSort()))
    {
      return;
    }
 
    if (!in_array(strtolower($sort[1]), array('asc', 'desc')))
    {
      $sort[1] = 'asc';
    }
 
    switch ($sort[0]) {
      case 'last_name':
        $sort[0] = 'p.last_name';
        break;
    }
 
    $query->addOrderBy($sort[0] . ' ' . $sort[1]);
  }
...

Update:A few comments below pointed out for the default admin generator theme you’ll also need to add the following method to your controller (actions.class.php):

protected function isValidSortColumn($column)
{
  return Doctrine_Core::getTable(‘Payment’)->hasColumn($column) || $column == ‘last_name’;
}

Once you get used to this process, it’s really not too hard to implement for all of your admin-generated modules. No plugins necessary.

Update 2: Updated doSelect query to use root alias defined in the query per the comments below.

class NewsletterForm extends BaseNewsletterForm
{
  public function configure()
  {
    $this->widgetSchema['file'] = new sfWidgetFormInputFileEditable(array(
      'file_src' => '/uploads/'.$this->getObject()->getfile(),
      'is_image'  => true,
      'edit_mode' => !$this->isNew(),
      //'template'  => '<div>%file%<br />%input%<br />%delete% %delete_label%</div>',
    ));
 
    $this->validatorSchema['file'] = new sfValidatorFile(array(
      'required' => false,
      'path' => sfConfig::get('sf_upload_dir')
    ));
 
    $this->validatorSchema['file_delete'] = new sfValidatorPass();
  }
}

If you want to override the file name generated for your uploaded file, add a ‘generateXXXFileName()’ method to your model’s class where XXX is the column name that contains the file name (in this example, our column is “file”, so the method name is ‘generateFileFilename’. It takes a single parameter, which is an instance of sfValidatedFile.

class Newsletter extends BaseNewsletter
{
  public function generateFileFileName($file)
  {
    return $file->getOriginalName();
  }
}

>> doctrine Could not create database for c...o use near '-sb-test' at line 1

Turns out the issue is with the “-” in my test database name. Replacing the hyphens with underscores fixed the problem.

To use an example off of the doctrine-user group, imagine you have a Content object and this may or may not have a related Metadata record.

If you are familiar with Propel, then if you had your hydrated $content object, you could do

// with propel:
if ($metadata = $content->getMetadata()) {
  // do something with the related $metadata
}

and getMetadata() would return NULL if there was no related record to be found.

Doctrine will automatically create an empty related object if you request one, so calling $content->Metadata or $content['Metadata'] or $content->getMetadata() will always return a Metadata object, even if it does not exist in the database. So, you can’t rely on the same trick above to see if a related object exists.

So, how do you check if a related object actually exists? The first way, and my favorite, is using the exists() method to check if the related object is persistent (i.e. the object is saved in the DB).

// with doctrine 
if ($content->Metadata->exists()) { 
  // related metadata exists for this $content object
}

Using isset() will check if the related object has been hydrated/ loaded, but it will not do a query against the database to see if it exists there. So, if you fetch a Content object and do not do any joins in your query to join the related Metadata objects, then isset(), either by doing isset($business->Metadata) or $business->isset('Metadata') will *always* return false.

If your foreign key to the related object exists in your parent record (if content has a metadata_id field) you can always check the value of $content['metadata_id']. This will not work if the foreign key exists only in your metadata table (metadata has a column content_id, but content does not have a metadata_id column).

I think if you really wanted to do it right, if you expect to be checking for the existence of a related object (“Metadata”) on your collection of core objects (“Content”), you should do a join in your query so you don’t have to hit the database for every single Content record fetched to see if a related Metadata record exists.

Here are a few threads on this subject in the doctrine-user group:

• Call $record->Related without creating new object
• hasOne relationship
• Awkward handling of One-to-Zero-or-One relationships in Doctrine