Doctrine 2.3 Criteria. Accessing a related Object

Question

I am trying to set up a Criteria according to the Doctrine Docs.

Unfortunately they don\'t tell you how to access attributes of an related Object. Let me give you an

Answer 1

That probably belongs in a repository method, rather than a filter method. If you're wanting to get a pre-filtered list of Products in a collection on a parent object (like an Order or something), you can filter the child collection in the query builder. However, you have to deal with the possibly confusing side-effect of not having fully hydrated objects.

This should give you a list of Order objects, which only having Product children matching a category name.

class OrderRepository extends EntityRepository {
  public function findOrderWithProductCategory($category)
  {
    $builder = $this->createQueryBuilder('o')
      ->select('o, p')
      ->leftJoin('o.products', 'p')
      ->join('p.category', 'c', 'WITH', 'c.name = :category')
      ->setParameter('category', $category);
  }
}

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If you don't know what kind of categories you're interested until later, then you're probably better using @Flip's solution anyway, and pre-hydrating all the categories. Using partial hydration and standard ArrayCollection::filter() closures, performs pretty well in most cases.

That said, it would be quite nice as a feature. I suspect the Doctrine guys would be reluctant because the current Criteria implementation is very light-weight and they probably want to keep it that way.