Doctrine2: Best way to handle many-to-many with extra columns in reference table

Question

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

Answer 1

You ask for the "best way" but there is no best way. There are many ways and you already discovered some of them. How you want to manage and/or encapsulate association management when using association classes is entirely up to you and your concrete domain, noone can show you a "best way" I'm afraid.

Apart from that, the question could be simplified a lot by removing Doctrine and relational databases from the equation. The essence of your question boils down to a question about how to deal with association classes in plain OOP.