Problem Description
I'm wondering what's the best, the cleanest and the most simply way to work with many-to-many relations in Doctrine2.
Let's assume that we've got an album like [*Master of Puppets* by Metallica](http://www.last.fm/music/Metallica/Master+of+Puppets) with several tracks. But please note the fact that one track might appears in more that one album, like [*Battery* by Metallica](http://www.last.fm/music/Metallica/Master+of+Puppets/Battery) does - three albums are featuring this track.
So what I need is many-to-many relationship between albums and tracks, using third table with some additional columns (like position of the track in specified album). Actually I have to use, as Doctrine's documentation suggests, a double one-to-many relation to achieve that functionality.
/** @Entity() */
class Album {
/** @Id @Column(type="integer") */
protected $id;
/** @Column() */
protected $title;
/** @OneToMany(targetEntity="AlbumTrackReference", mappedBy="album") */
protected $tracklist;
public function __construct() {
$this->tracklist = new \Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection();
}
public function getTitle() {
return $this->title;
}
public function getTracklist() {
return $this->tracklist->toArray();
}
}
/** @Entity() */
class Track {
/** @Id @Column(type="integer") */
protected $id;
/** @Column() */
protected $title;
/** @Column(type="time") */
protected $duration;
/** @OneToMany(targetEntity="AlbumTrackReference", mappedBy="track") */
protected $albumsFeaturingThisTrack; // btw: any idea how to name this relation? :)
public function getTitle() {
return $this->title;
}
public function getDuration() {
return $this->duration;
}
}
/** @Entity() */
class AlbumTrackReference {
/** @Id @Column(type="integer") */
protected $id;
/** @ManyToOne(targetEntity="Album", inversedBy="tracklist") */
protected $album;
/** @ManyToOne(targetEntity="Track", inversedBy="albumsFeaturingThisTrack") */
protected $track;
/** @Column(type="integer") */
protected $position;
/** @Column(type="boolean") */
protected $isPromoted;
public function getPosition() {
return $this->position;
}
public function isPromoted() {
return $this->isPromoted;
}
public function getAlbum() {
return $this->album;
}
public function getTrack() {
return $this->track;
}
}
Sample data:
Album
+---...
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