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