doctrine2 association is not initialized

Question

I have a Class like the following:

/** @Entity **/
class orgGroup{

    //id and stuff...

    /**
     * @Column(type=\"string\")
     **/
    private $name         


        

Answer 1

Try to change fetch mode to EAGER.

@ORM\ManyToOne(targetEntity="****", fetch="EAGER"). 

It worked for me.

Answer 2

//Group.php ...

public function addUser(User $user): self
{
    if (!$this->users->contains($user)) {
        $this->users[] = $user;
        $user->addJoinedGroup($this);     /** VERY IMPORTANT **/
    }
    return $this;
}

Same in User.php Without it, it didn't do anything in my database

Answer 3

Be sure to initialize the orgGroups collection in the orgGroupType entity

/**
 * @OneToMany(targetEntity="orgGroup", mappedBy="_orgGroupType")
 */
protected $orgGroups ;

public function __construct() {
    $this->orgGroups = new ArrayCollection();
}

You might need to include the following in the Entity

use Doctrine\Common\Collections\Collection,
Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection;

Answer 4

This looks to me like a lazy-loading-issue. How do you get the data from the object into the Webservice answer?

Doctrine2 is lazy-loading if you don't configure something else, that means your $groups = $em->getRepository("orgGroup")->findAll(); won't return real orgGroup objects, but Proxy objects (Doctrine Documentation).

That means a $group object won't have it's description or orgGroupType value until you call $group->getDescription() or $group->getOrgGroupType() (then Doctrine loads them automatically), so you need to do that before writing the data into the JSON-response for the webservice. It won't work if you somehow loop through the object properties without using the getter methods.

I hope that was the problem :)