Is it possible to communicate in Doctrine2 without a target?

Question

There is a ManyToOne association defined between Pattern and Category objects (the template is the party that owns the relationship). A category has many templates; a template belongs to one category. So, there is a Pattern.category field with @ManyToOne Doctrine annotation.

Now in my script I have the id of the Category object (sent from the form), which I want to assign to the Pattern.category field of the newly created template (which will be saved), but I do not want to load this Category object - I do not need it, I just want create a Pattern object, assign it a category (which I have) and save it. It seems strange to me that I need to load the Category object in order to establish a connection, when all I really need is just the identifier that I already have.

It may smell like using the concepts of relational databases with ORM, but it seems completely pointless to download this object only to establish a connection when I know the identifier of this target.

I am new to Doctrine btw.

Answer 1

You can use Reference Proxy :

 $category = $em->getReference('Category', $id); $pattern->setCategory($category);