Separating Concerns using Embeddables
-------------------------------------
Embeddables are classes which are not entities themself, but are embedded
in entities and can also be queried in DQL. You'll mostly want to use them
to reduce duplication or separating concerns.
For the purposes of this tutorial, we will assume that you have a ``User``
class in your application and you would like to store an address in
the ``User`` class. We will model the ``Address`` class as an embeddable
instead of simply adding the respective columns to the ``User`` class.
.. configuration-block::
.. code-block:: php
.. code-block:: yaml
User:
type: entity
embedded:
address:
class: Address
Address:
type: embeddable
fields:
street: { type: string }
postalCode: { type: string }
city: { type: string }
country: { type: string }
In terms of your database schema, Doctrine will automatically inline all
columns from the ``Address`` class into the table of the ``User`` class,
just as if you had declared them directly there.
Column Prefixing
----------------
By default, Doctrine names your columns by prefixing them, using the value
object name.
Following the example above, your columns would be named as ``address_street``,
``address_postalCode``...
You can change this behaviour to meet your needs by changing the
``columnPrefix`` attribute in the ``@Embeddable`` notation.
The following example shows you how to set your prefix to ``myPrefix_``:
.. configuration-block::
.. code-block:: php
.. code-block:: yaml
User:
type: entity
embedded:
address:
class: Address
columnPrefix: myPrefix_
To have Doctrine drop the prefix and use the value object's property name
directly, set ``columnPrefix=false`` (``use-column-prefix="false"`` for XML):
.. configuration-block::
.. code-block:: php
DQL
---
You can also use mapped fields of embedded classes in DQL queries, just
as if they were declared in the ``User`` class:
.. code-block:: sql
SELECT u FROM User u WHERE u.address.city = :myCity