Getting a “true” object from a proxy object in doctrine2

Question

Doctrine uses proxy objects to represent related objects in order to facilitate lazy loading. This is a really cool feature, but its causing an issue with something I am trying

Answer 1

You get an unique instance of an entity from Doctrine. If you request it two times, you'll always get the same object.

As a consequence, if your entity is lazy-loaded first (via a @ManyToOne somewhere for example), this entity instance will be a Proxy.

Example:

You have a User entity having a bidirectional @OneToOne on a Config entity...

Case 1

You request your User:

• you get a real instance of User
• $user->config will contain a Proxy

If later on you request the same Config entity in any piece of your app, you'll end up with that proxy.

Case 2

You request your Config and your User has never been imported before:

• you get a real instance of Config
• $config->user will contain a Proxy

If later on you request the same User entity in any piece of your app, you'll end up with that proxy.

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All in all, querying again for the same entity will still end up to a proxy (which is an instance of your User anyway, because the generated proxy extends from it).

If you really need a second instance of your entity that is a real one (if some of your app logic does a get_class that you can't replace by instanceof for example), you can try to play with $em->detach() but it will be a nightmare (and thus your app may behave with even more magic than Doctrine already bring).

A solution (coming from my dark side, I assume) can be recreating a non-managed Entity manually.

public function getRealEntity($proxy)
{
    if ($proxy instanceof Doctrine\ORM\Proxy\Proxy) {
        $metadata              = $this->getManager()->getMetadataFactory()->getMetadataFor(get_class($proxy));
        $class                 = $metadata->getName();
        $entity                = new $class();
        $reflectionSourceClass = new \ReflectionClass($proxy);
        $reflectionTargetClass = new \ReflectionClass($entity);
        foreach ($metadata->getFieldNames() as $fieldName) {
            $reflectionPropertySource = $reflectionSourceClass->getProperty($fieldName);
            $reflectionPropertySource->setAccessible(true);
            $reflectionPropertyTarget = $reflectionTargetClass->getProperty($fieldName);
            $reflectionPropertyTarget->setAccessible(true);
            $reflectionPropertyTarget->setValue($entity, $reflectionPropertySource->getValue($proxy));
        }

        return $entity;
    }

    return $proxy;
}