Unclutter your project
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.
Its easy to switch to XML format by changing the yml to xml. Of course you have to migrate any existing *.orm.yml to *.orm.xml.
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.
type: annotation
dir: '%kernel.project_dir%/src/Entity'
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.
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.