Best Practices¶
Here are some best practices you can follow when working with the Doctrine MongoDB ODM.
Constrain relationships as much as possible¶
It is important to constrain relationships as much as possible. This means:
- Impose a traversal direction (avoid bidirectional associations if possible)
- Eliminate nonessential associations
This has several benefits:
- Reduced coupling in your domain model
- Simpler code in your domain model (no need to maintain bidirectionality properly)
- Less work for Doctrine
Use events judiciously¶
The event system of Doctrine is great and fast. Even though making heavy use of events, especially lifecycle events, can have a negative impact on the performance of your application. Thus you should use events judiciously.
Use cascades judiciously¶
Automatic cascades of the persist/remove/merge/etc. operations are very handy but should be used wisely. Do NOT simply add all cascades to all associations. Think about which cascades actually do make sense for you for a particular association, given the scenarios it is most likely used in.
Don't use special characters¶
Avoid using any non-ASCII characters in class, field, table or column names. Doctrine itself is not unicode-safe in many places and will not be until PHP itself is fully unicode-aware.
Initialize collections in the constructor¶
It is recommended best practice to initialize any business collections in documents in the constructor.
Example:
<?php
namespace MyProject\Model;
use Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection;
class User
{
private $addresses;
private $articles;
public function __construct()
{
$this->addresses = new ArrayCollection;
$this->articles = new ArrayCollection;
}
}
