Self relationship Doctrine

Question

I’m using Doctrine, and now I have the following problem.

I am making a register of menus system, where the same can have several "children" and their "children" can also have "children", and so on.

How will I realize this self-relationship with Doctrine?

I have already performed the mapping in the Menu class with the Annotations, but I could not understand how I will do this mapping in the query, so that when performing the search the menu object is already filled with all the items correctly.

Below is the mapping I performed in the Menu class:

/**
 * @ORM\Entity
 * @ORM\Table(name="tb_Menu")
 */
class Menu
{
    /**
     * @ORM\Id
     * @ORM\GeneratedValue("SEQUENCE")
     * @ORM\Column(type="integer", nullable=false)
     * @ORM\SequenceGenerator(sequenceName="sq_Menu")
     */
    private $id;

    /**
     * @ORM\ManyToOne(targetEntity="Menu", inversedBy="menuFilho")
     * @ORM\JoinColumn(name="idMenuPai", referencedColumnName="id")
     */
    private $menuPai;

    /**
     * @ORM\OneToMany(targetEntity="Menu", mappedBy="menuPai")
     */
    private $menuFilho;

    /**
     * @ORM\Column(type="string", length=30, unique=true, nullable=false)
     */
    private $titulo;

    /** 
     * @ORM\Column(type="string", length=80)
     */
    private $descricao;

    /* 
     * Construtor
     */
    public function __construct() {
        $this->menuFilho = new ArrayCollection();
    }
}

Answer 1

What you need to do is create a One-To-Many Self-referencing Relationship.

Read this section in the Doctrine documentation:

http://doctrine-orm.readthedocs.org/en/latest/reference/association-mapping.html#one-to-Many-self-referencing

Basically, you will use a single table to build the tree in your menu, and the rows of the child nodes will relate to their respective parent nodes through the same table.

In addition, there is a very interesting extension to the Doctrine, called Tree. With this extension you can build tree-like structures in your database (for example, your case of categories and sub-categories) and still render an HTML on top of that structure. See if it fits.