Using Doctrine Annotations in Sylius

Unclutter your project

As a newbie to Sylius and Symfony, the many configuration files are overwhelmed me, so I decided to reduce them by doing the database mappings inside my models using Doctrine Annotations. Since Sylius recommends the usage of YAML or XML (for reasons I don’t know), there is no documentation available about how to switch to annotations. However, after some trial and error I got it to work.

Under the hood Sylius uses Doctrine ORM to map your models to the database. Doctrine offers three ways to define the mapping configuration:

• Yaml

• XML

• Annotations

A fresh Sylius project will use *.yaml files by default, which are living in Resources/config/doctrine/. This is configured in config/packages/doctrine.yml at the very bottom.

 1parameters:
 2    # Adds a fallback DATABASE_URL if the env var is not set.
 3    # This allows you to run cache:warmup even if your
 4    # environment variables are not available yet.
 5    # You should not need to change this value.
 6    env(DATABASE_URL): ''
 7 
 8doctrine:
 9    dbal:
10        driver: 'pdo_mysql'
11        server_version: '%env(resolve:DATABASE_SERVER_VERSION)%'
12        charset: UTF8
13 
14        url: '%env(resolve:DATABASE_URL)%'
15    orm:
16        auto_generate_proxy_classes: '%kernel.debug%'
17        naming_strategy:
18            doctrine.orm.naming_strategy.underscore
19        auto_mapping: true
20        mappings:
21            App:
22                is_bundle: false
23                type: yml
24                dir: '%kernel.project_dir%/src/Resources/config/doctrine'
25                prefix: 'App\Entity'
26                alias: App

There are only two changes in this file:

• use annotation as type

• change the path from the folder with the config files to the folder with your entities / models.

1type: annotation
2dir: '%kernel.project_dir%/src/Entity'

As a last step I had to add the annotations to all my models. This is surprisingly easy with PhpStorm and the Symfony Plugin enabled. With the cursor inside the class I had to type Ctrl + Enter to get this menu:

With selecting the ORM Class item, PhpStorm added the necessary annotations to the class:

In this case the database name is correct as PhpStorm just derives the name from the model. I had to change it to sylius_product. With the menu item ORM Annotation PhpStorm helps you to generate the mapping configurations to the class properties:

Conclusion:

I like this approach much better than have the mapping somewhere else hidden.