Symfony2 - numeric fields in form collection trigger database update

Question

I have two Entities, called Bookings and Rooms. The Rooms are embedded as a collection in to the Booking Form. Everything works fine.

I then installed SimpleThings/EntityAuditBundle to version changes to the records. This all works fine and as expected except for one thing.

Say I have two Rooms defined in a Booking. I edit the Booking, but made zero changes to the form, and save it. Strange - the room_audit table now has a record saying I changed its values to one of the Room records via the embedded form collection etc. But I made no changes before saving.

Then via trial and error, I determine that if I remove the price form field from the RoomType embedded collection, which is a currency form type, then this additional audit record does not appear. If I change the field type of price to numeric then it appears again on saving. If I then change the field type to text then this additional record stops appearing.

SUMMARY

It seems that having a numeric field type such as a currency or a number in a embedded form collection is forcing the preUpdate lifecycle callback to be triggered even when there is nothing to update as no changes have been made. Change the field type to text and the preUpdate handler is not called unless there are values altered in the form.

Does anyone know why this behaviour seems to be based on using numeric form field types?

I'm using Symfony2.5.2 standard edition on MySQL with PHP 5.5.9

Thanks

Answer 1

I had a very similar issue when processing a form collection of entities that contained a text field. If I loaded the form to edit - but did not make any changes - it still schedule updates for all of the entities in the collection.

I discovered that in my Doctrine2 annotations - when defining the entity - the property was declared as an integer - not a varchar. When I changed the form field to integer - the form handler no longer attempted to update all of the entities in the collection.

So - perhaps you should look at your Doctrine2 annotations and make sure that the form field type matches your database schema.