Doctrine 2 - many to many join

Question

I have two entities in many to many relation:

class Foo
{
    /**
     * @ORM\ManyToMany(targetEntity="Bar", inversedBy="foos")
     * @ORM\JoinTable(name="Foo_x_Bar")
     */
    protected $bars;
}

class Bar
{
    /**
     * @ORM\ManyToMany(targetEntity="Foo", mappedBy="bars")
     */
    protected $foos;
}

I would like to fetch all pairs of Foo and Bar instances in a result set ie:

array (size=2)
  0 => 
    array (size=2)
        'Foo' => Foo instance
        'Bar' => Bar instance
  1 => 
    array (size=2)
        'Foo' => Foo instance
        'Bar' => Bar instance

I tried to do it in a several ways described on the web but I still can't select the whole entities. I am able to get particular columns with this query:

SELECT f.something, b.somethingElse FROM Entity\Foo f LEFT JOIN f.bars b

but when I omit column names in SELECT statement I only get Foo instances and Bar instances disappears. How can I get a result set containing both entities?

Answer 1

The ManyToMany relation is really quite limited in Doctrine 2. It's all generated automatically and it's not an entity.

If you want to go beyond the basic default behavior then create yourself a FooBar entity and setup individual ManyToOne relations with Foo and Bar.

Doing so will allow you to query directly on FooBar. It also allows you to add additional properties/relations to your join tables.