Doctrine: How to save only collection items that do not exist in DB yet

Question

I have a collection of items to save to database, but I want the record to be inserted only if not exists.

I think the most effective way would be to filter the collection before saving. Can Doctrine do it automatically?

Or shall I get all id's of all items in the collection, then query the database for items which do not exists on the list of these id's, then in foreach remove all collection items which we do not need, and finally save collection?

Any better approach suggested?

(Doctrine 1.2)

Answer 1

I don't know anything about Doctrine, but the MySQL REPLACE query does just what you want - updates existing rows & creates new rows if no primary key matches were found.

Answer 2

This is the save function from the Doctrine_Collection class

 public function save(Doctrine_Connection $conn = null, $processDiff = true)
    {
        if ($conn == null) {
            $conn = $this->_table->getConnection();
        }

        try {
            $conn->beginInternalTransaction();

            $conn->transaction->addCollection($this);

            if ($processDiff) {
                $this->processDiff();
            }

            foreach ($this->getData() as $key => $record) {
                $record->save($conn);
            }

            $conn->commit();
        } catch (Exception $e) {
            $conn->rollback();
            throw $e;
        }

        return $this;
    }

I'm not sure where you are getting your collection from, or if you are manually building it, but you might want to try extending the Doctrine_Collection class and overloading the save function like this

<?php

class My_Collection extends Doctrine Collection
{

  public function save(Doctrine_Connection $conn = null, $processDiff = true, $createOnly = true)
    {
        if ($conn == null) {
            $conn = $this->_table->getConnection();
        }

        try {
            $conn->beginInternalTransaction();

            $conn->transaction->addCollection($this);

            if ($processDiff) {
                $this->processDiff();
            }

            foreach ($this->getData() as $key => $record) {

                if($createOnly)
                {
                    if ($record->exists())
                    {
                        $record->save($conn);
                    }
                }else{
                    $record->save($conn);
                }
            }

            $conn->commit();
        } catch (Exception $e) {
            $conn->rollback();
            throw $e;
        }

        return $this;
    }

}