RemoveElement on sorted collection

[dan19]

I have a document Whatever with a collection "users" which reference many User.
This collection is sorted with an annotation.

/**
* @ODM\ReferenceMany(targetDocument="User", simple=true, sort={"lastname"="asc", "firstname"="asc"})
*/
protected $users = array();

If I try to delete one user reference from the collection.

$whatever->getUsers()->removeElement($user);

The user deleted is not the one I want to delete. There is an issue with the key here because of the sort annotation. The removeElement method should remove the element at the key x based on the order in the database.

Log :
doctrine.INFO: MongoDB query: {"update":true,"query":{"_id":{"$id":"51c4a13ffa4634362a000061"}},"newObj":{"$unset":{"users.2":true}},"options":{"safe":true,"fsync":false,"timeout":30000},"db":"something","collection":"Whatever"}

[jmikola]

This has come up on another issue/PR, but I can't seem to find it at the moment. Sort should really only be used on the inverse side of a ReferenceMany relationship, and in those cases changes to the PersistentCollection itself (not the documents it contains) would be ignored, since there really is no array on the parent document.

The problem with sorting in your case is that once the PersistentCollection is initialized, its ordering may immediately differ from what's actually stored in the database.

@j: Do you recall the other issue I was thinking of? It might have been one that you were involved with.

[Jimgitsit]

Am am also experiencing this issue. Has there been any resolution to this?

[malarzm]

@Jimgitsit I believe most important part is @jmikola's

Sort should really only be used on the inverse side of a ReferenceMany relationship

and maybe we should throw exception if owning side tries to use this combination? If you really want to stick with sort here try using setArray or atomicSetArray for your collection, it should do the trick. I think I've seen a PR that would fix removing sorted references using addToSet or pushAll strategies but I need to find it (that wasn't sole purpose of that PR but it will be enough for us)

[malarzm]

For the record PR I had in mind is #524

[malarzm]

#1191 has been merged manually in 56796fa