Maintained
3.6 (upcoming) 3.5.0 (current)
Unmaintained
3.4 3.3 3.2 3.1 3.0 2.2

:depth: 3

index basic-usage collections-strategy by-value-by-reference laminas-form enum-strategy performance-considerations

By Value and by Reference

By default, Doctrine hydrator works by value. This means that the hydrator will access and modify properties through the public API of an entity (that is, with getters and setters). You can override this behaviour to work by reference (the hydrator will access the properties through the Reflection API and bypass your getters and setters).

To change the behaviour from by value to by reference, set the second parameter of the constructor to false:

1use Doctrine\Laminas\Hydrator\DoctrineObject as DoctrineHydrator;

$hydrator = new DoctrineHydrator($objectManager, false);


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To illustrate the difference between the two, consider an extraction with the given entity:

1namespace Application\Entity;

use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;

#[ORM\Entity]
class SimpleEntity
{
    #[ORM\Column(type: 'string')]
    private ?string $foo = null;

    public function getFoo(): void
    {
        die();
    }

    /** ... */
}


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Using the hydrator by value:

1use Doctrine\Laminas\Hydrator\DoctrineObject as DoctrineHydrator;

$hydrator = new DoctrineHydrator($objectManager);
$object   = new SimpleEntity();
$object->setFoo('bar');

$data = $hydrator->extract($object);

echo $data['foo']; // never executed, because the script was killed when getter was accessed


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The hydrator used the public API getFoo() to retrieve the value.

Using the hydrator by reference:

1use Doctrine\Laminas\Hydrator\DoctrineObject as DoctrineHydrator;

$hydrator = new DoctrineHydrator($objectManager, false);
$object   = new SimpleEntity();
$object->setFoo('bar');

$data = $hydrator->extract($object);

echo $data['foo']; // prints 'bar'


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It prints bar, showing that the getter was not called.