My symfony2 application has the following structure:
There is a service data_provider
, which gets data from various external sources and represents it as entity objects.
Some objects has relations. Currently I am loading relations in controller or helper-services if needed.
It is not very convenient, sometimes I want to get relations from my entity ojbect. To do this I need access to data_provider
service.
I want to implement something like doctrine lazy-loading, what is the right way of doing this ?
Some obvious solutions - to inject data_provider
in every entity instacne, or to some static property, or to make some static methods in service, or to use evenet dispatcher, but I don't think it is the right way
Made some research of ObjectManagerInterface as Cerad suggested, and found this peace of code: https://github.com/doctrine/common/blob/master/lib/Doctrine/Common/Persistence/PersistentObject.php
PersistentObject implements ObjectManagerAware interface, it has private static property where ObjectManager is stored.
So I ended with this:
class DataProvider
{
public function __construct()
{
...
AbstractEntity::setDataProvider($this);
}
}
abstract class AbstractEntity
{
private static $dataProvider;
public static function setDataProvider() {...};
protected static function getDataProvider() {...};
}
The main purpose of services in Symfony (and not only) is exactly this one - to deliver distinguished functionalitys globally over your project.
In this regard, a single service, in your case - dataProvider, should always deliver a single entity. If you have to deal with multiple entities returned from one data source, wrap the data source deliverer into a service itself, and then define one service per each entity with the deliverer injected into it.
Then you can inject the respective entity services into your controllers.