I wish to persist some extra data in a many-to-many relationship by having some extra fields in the association table. For instance, I would like to keep track of what role a user has in a network, such as 'member', 'moderator', 'admin' etc. I would also like to keep track of when he/she joined the network. Now, what I am looking for is an efficient way to retrieve these extra fields using Doctrine. A typical, though very simplified, DQL-query might look like so:
// find.network.by.slug
Doctrine_Query::create()
->select('*')
->from('Network n')
->leftJoin('n.Members u')
->where('n.slug = ?');
So, given that I have a User from the Members relation, is there any way I can "backtrack" into the NetworkMembers relation and fetch the extra fields?
If not, how do I re-arrange my schema to enable me to do this efficiently?
(i.e. I don't want to iterate over all networks the member has to find the network I started from and fetch the role and member_since field).
Code illustration of my problem:
$networkTable = Doctrine::getTable('Network');
$network = $networkTable->executeOne('find.network.by.slug', $slug);
$members = $network->Members;
foreach($members as $member) {
// How do I access the fields in the NetworksMember association?
}
Schema below:
User:
tableName: users
columns:
user_id:
name: user_id as userId
type: integer(8)
unsigned: 1
primary: true
autoincrement: true
username:
type: string(30)
notnull: true
unique: true
relations:
Networks:
class: Network
local: user_id
foreign: network_id
refClass: NetworkMembers
type: many
Network:
tableName: networks
actAs:
Sluggable:
unique: true
fields: [name]
canUpdate: true
Timestampable:
columns:
id:
type: integer(8)
unsigned: 1
primary: true
autoincrement: true
name:
type: string(64)
notnull: true
relations:
Members:
class: User
type: many
refClass: NetworkMembers
local: network_id
foreign: user_id
foreignAlias: Networks
foreignType: many
NetworkMembers:
actAs:
Timestampable:
created:
name: member_since as memberSince
type: timestamp
updated:
disabled: true
columns:
networkId:
name: network_id as networkId
type: integer(8)
unsigned: 1
primary: true
userId:
name: user_id as userId
type: integer(8)
unsigned: 1
primary: true
role:
type: enum
values: [member, moderator, admin]
default: member
relations:
Network:
type: one
local: network_id
foreign: id
Member:
class: User
type: one
local: user_id
foreign: user_id