doctrine 2 many to many (Products - Categories)

Question

Hi I have a many to many relation between Items(Products) and categories and I implemented using these three entities:

1. Item Entity:

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Answer 1

A 3rd entity is only useful if you want to set some properties of the Relation between Category and Item. For example Item "belongs" to Category, item is "suggested" to be added to category, item is "pending" deletion from category. Since your ItemCategories doesn't show any of such properties you are really best of doing it the way the manual specifies. Read more about it here: http://docs.doctrine-project.org/en/latest/reference/association-mapping.html#many-to-many-bidirectional