Avoid lazy loading Doctrine Symfony2

Question

I have two entities in my project : User and Avatar.

User owns Avatar with a OneToOne relation.

Avatar is an entity with a file object and a fileName. It uses @ORM\HasLifecycleCallbacks to save the file or to remove it as described in the Symfony2 documentation.

In my controller, I want to remove the Avatar entity from the current user (I use $user = $this->get('security.context')->getToken()->getUser()), but I can't get to the avatar with $user->getAvatar() :

var_dump($user->getAvatar());

object(AppBundle\Entity\Avatar)
    private 'id' => int 20
    public 'file' => null
    private 'fileName' => null

But if I try to acces the avatar's fileName, it gets returned :

$filename = $user->getAvatar()->getFileName();
var_dump($user->getAvatar());

object(AppBundle\Entity\Avatar)
    private 'id' => int 20
    public 'file' => null
    private 'fileName' => string 'myfile.png'

How can I get the Avatar associated with my user ?

Solution

As described in the Doctrine docs, you just need to specify the fetching behavior to be eager.

/**
 * @OneToOne(targetEntity="User", fetch="EAGER")
 * @JoinColumn(name="user_id", referencedColumnName="id")
 */

See the documentation for YAML or other configuration examples.

Comments

[Leogout]

Thank you so mutch, i've been searching for hours now ! (It's "EAGER", "eager" throw an exeption)

[Andrey S. Rabchevsky]

Changing the fetch mode during a query is only possible for one-to-one and many-to-one relations.

[thoroc]

For ref: I had to put the fetch argument in the @OneToOne annotation for it to work under Symfony 2.8 Doctrine/ORM 2.5

[Nisse Engström]

@Anonymous: Note this suggested edit about the placement of the fetch attribute. I don't know, but it seems to be consistent with the documentation. As the author of the post, I think you can still accept the edit if you think it is correct.

[Pete]

@NisseEngström: Thanks. I'm not sure why my edit was rejected by the other two reviewers, this answer is just plain wrong without it, but very close to correct. Would it be bad form to suggest an edit again? See: github.com/doctrine/doctrine2/blob/master/lib/Doctrine/ORM/… and github.com/doctrine/doctrine2/blob/master/lib/Doctrine/ORM/… for valid the annotation definitions and their valid attributes.

[Nisse Engström]

@Pete: Code edits are tricky to get through, especially on an accepted answer. I've applied the edit myself since it is consistent with Anonymous' own link and there hasn't been any objections. Given this, I feel reasonably confident that the edit is correct even though I'm not familiar with the subject.