Simple Nested Sets in Doctrine 2

Unlike Doctrine 1 with it’s NestedSet behaviour, there is no nested set functionality in the core of Doctrine 2. There are a few extensions available that offer nested set support:

I tried all of these extensions, but none of them felt simple or lightweight enough for my application. What I wanted to do was have a Category entity which could have a tree of sub-categories, e.g:

Food
    Pizza
        Margherita
        La Reine
        Giardiniera
    Chocolate
        Dark
        Milk
        White

The simplest way I found of doing this without using any extensions was to make use of SPL’s RecursiveIterator and RecursiveIteratorIterator classes. Here’s the final code, to output a drop-down menu like this one:

Hierarchical Dropdown

/** @var $em \Doctrine\ORM\EntityManager */
$root_categories = $em->getRepository('Entity\Category')->findBy(array('parent_category' => null));

$collection = new Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection($root_categories);
$category_iterator = new Entity\RecursiveCategoryIterator($collection);
$recursive_iterator = new RecursiveIteratorIterator($category_iterator, RecursiveIteratorIterator::SELF_FIRST);

foreach ($recursive_iterator as $index => $child_category)
{
    echo '<option value="' . $child_category->getId() . '">' . str_repeat('&nbsp;&nbsp;', $recursive_iterator->getDepth()) . $child_category->getTitle() . '</option>';
}

Here’s how it’s done. Start out with an entity class that looks something like this:

namespace Entity;

/**
 * @Entity
 * @Table(name="category")
 */
class Category
{

    /**
     * @Id
     * @Column(type="integer", nullable=false)
     * @GeneratedValue(strategy="IDENTITY")
     */
    protected $id;

    /**
     * @Column(type="string", length=130, nullable=false)
     */
    protected $title;

    /**
     * @ManyToOne(targetEntity="Category", inversedBy="child_categories")
     * @JoinColumn(name="parent_category_id", referencedColumnName="id")
     */
    protected $parent_category;

    /**
     * @OneToMany(targetEntity="Category", mappedBy="parent_category")
     */
    protected $child_categories;

    public function __construct()
    {
        $this->child_categories = new \Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection;
    }

    // Getters and setters ...

}

Next, the RecursiveCategoryIterator class. I have written this to interface with Doctrine’s Collection object, but it could easily be re-written to work with native PHP arrays (see this note in the PHP manual for an example of a RecursiveIterator class that uses native arrays).

namespace Entity;

use Doctrine\Common\Collections\Collection;

class RecursiveCategoryIterator implements \RecursiveIterator
{

    private $_data;

    public function __construct(Collection $data)
    {
        $this->_data = $data;
    }

    public function hasChildren()
    {
        return ( ! $this->_data->current()->getChildCategories()->isEmpty());
    }

    public function getChildren()
    {
        return new RecursiveCategoryIterator($this->_data->current()->getChildCategories());
    }

    public function current()
    {
        return $this->_data->current();
    }

    public function next()
    {
        $this->_data->next();
    }

    public function key()
    {
        return $this->_data->key();
    }

    public function valid()
    {
        return $this->_data->current() instanceof \Entity\Category;
    }

    public function rewind()
    {
        $this->_data->first();
    }

}

That’s everything! A very simple Nested Set behaviour in Doctrine 2 using only a simple RecursiveIterator class – no complicated extensions.

Edit: As Hans has pointed out, while this approach does allow us to model hierarchies, it is not truly a nested set model as it does not number each node to allow for tree traversal. This model is probably closer to an adjacency list.