Tag: Doctrine

Doctrine 2: Resolving "unknown database type enum requested"

I came across this recently while I was developing a module for PyroCMS. Some of the PyroCMS tables contain ENUM columns, which Doctrine doesn’t support. You would think that this wouldn’t be an issue since these tables are not mapped, but apparently when Doctrine builds the schema it includes all tables in the database - even if they are not mapped. This has been reported as an issue, but the Doctrine team has given it a low priority.

The symptom? When using the SchemaTool to create, update, or drop the schema; an exception is thrown:

**Fatal error**: Uncaught exception 'Doctrine\DBAL\DBALException' with message 'Unknown database type enum requested, Doctrine\DBAL\Platforms\MySqlPlatform may not support it.'

Thankfully, the fix is very easy. There is even a Doctrine Cookbook article about it. All you have to do is register the ENUM type as a Doctrine varchar (string):

/** @var $em \Doctrine\ORM\EntityManager */
$platform = $em->getConnection()->getDatabasePlatform();
$platform->registerDoctrineTypeMapping('enum', 'string');

This fix can be applied to any unsupported data type, for example SET (which is also used in PyroCMS):

$platform->registerDoctrineTypeMapping('set', 'string');

CodeIgniter 2/Doctrine 2 Installation

If you want a quick way of getting Doctrine 2 working with CodeIgniter 2, you can download a pre-configured installation from my GitHub repository. There are currently three branches available:

• master - the latest stable versions of CodeIgniter and Doctrine.
• develop - the latest development versions of CodeIgniter and Doctrine. Not recommended for production use.
• doctrine-2.1 - the latest stable version of CodeIgniter, and the latest stable 2.1.X version of Doctrine. This branch is provided as a way of keeping Doctrine 2.1 applications up to date without breaking backwards compatibility.

For more information, read my post on integrating Doctrine 2 with CodeIgniter 2

Useful Doctrine 2 Console Commands

Doctrine 2’s console is really powerful when you know how to use it. You can generate entity classes and their method stubs, reverse-engineer a database, validate your entity schemas, and much more. In this post, I’m going to cover some of the Doctrine console’s more useful commands and explain how you can use them to reduce development time. For a full overview of the Doctrine 2 console, read the Doctrine Tools documentation.