php - How to avoid duplicate entries in a many-to-many relationship with Doctrine?

Question

I'm using an embed Symfony form to add and remove Tag entities right from the article editor. Article is the owning side on the association:

class Article
{
    /**
     * @ManyToMany(targetEntity="Tags", inversedBy="articles", cascade={"persist"})
     */
    private $tags;

    public function addTag(Tag $tags)
    {
        if (!$this->tags->contains($tags)) // It is always true.
            $this->tags[] = $tags;
    }
}

The condition doesn't help here, as it is always true, and if it wasn't, no new tags would be persisted to the database at all. Here is the Tag entity:

class Tag
{
    /**
     * @Column(unique=true)
     */
    private $name

    /**
     * @ManyToMany(targetEntity="Articles", mappedBy="tags")
     */
    private $articles;

    public function addArticle(Article $articles)
    {
        $this->articles[] = $articles;
    }
}

I've set $name to unique, because I want to use the same tag every time I enter the same name in the form. But it doesn't work this way, and I get the exception:

Integrity constraint violation: 1062 Duplicate entry

What do I need to change to use article_tag, the default join table when submitting a tag name, that's already in the Tag table?

Answer 1

I have been battling with a similar issue for months and finally found a solution that seems to be working very well in my application. It's a complex application with quite a few many-to-many associations and I need to handle them with maximum efficiency.

The solution is explained in part here: http://docs.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-orm/en/latest/reference/faq.html#why-do-i-get-exceptions-about-unique-constraint-failures-during-em-flush

You were already halfway there with your code:

public function addTag(Tag $tags)
{
    if (!$this->tags->contains($tags)) // It is always true.
        $this->tags[] = $tags;
}

Basically what I have added to this is to set indexedBy="name" and fetch="EXTRA_LAZY" on the owning side of the relationship, which in your case is Article entity (you may need to scroll the code block horizontally to see the addition):

class Article
{
    /**
     * @ManyToMany(targetEntity="Tags", inversedBy="articles", cascade={"persist"}, indexedBy="name" fetch="EXTRA_LAZY")
     */
    private $tags;

You can read up about the fetch="EXTRA_LAZY" option here.

You can read up about indexBy="name" option here.

Next, I modified my versions of your addTag() method as follows:

public function addTag(Tag $tags)
{
    // Check for an existing entity in the DB based on the given
    // entity's PRIMARY KEY property value
    if ($this->tags->contains($tags)) {
        return $this; // or just return;
    }
    
    // This prevents adding duplicates of new tags that aren't in the
    // DB already.
    $tagKey = $tag->getName() ?? $tag->getHash();
    $this->tags[$tagKey] = $tags;
}

NOTE: The ?? null coalesce operator requires PHP7+.

By setting the fetch strategy for tags to EXTRA_LAZY the following statement causes Doctrine to perform a SQL query to check if a Tag with the same name exists in the DB (see the related EXTRA_LAZY link above for more):

$this->tags->contains($tags)

NOTE: This can only return true if the PRIMARY KEY field of the entity passed to it is set. Doctrine can only query for existing entities in the database/entity map based on the PRIMARY KEY of that entity, when using methods like ArrayCollection::contains(). If the name property of the Tag entity is only a UNIQUE KEY, that's probably why it's always returning false. You will need a PRIMARY KEY to use methods like contains() effectively.

The rest of the code in the addTag() method after the if block creates a key for the ArrayCollection of Tags either by the value in the PRIMARY KEY property (preferred if not null) or by the Tag entity's hash (search Google for "PHP + spl_object_hash", used by Doctrine to index entities). So, you are creating an indexed association, so that if you add the same entity twice before a flush, it will just be re-added at the same key, but not duplicated.