[Reflection] Use default typed property value when setting value to null

[ruudk]

Related to doctrine/orm#7999

I'm using typed properties with a default value that is not null. Example:

class Entity {
    /**
     * @ORM\Column(name="id", type="integer")
     * @ORM\Id
     * @ORM\GeneratedValue(strategy="AUTO")
     */
    private int $id = 0;

    public function getId() : int
    {
        return $this->id;
    }
}

This works great. When inserting a new entity in the database, the auto incremented id is updated properly.

It means that entities that are not persisted will have a 0 as id and the rest will have another non-zero integer value.

But upon deleting an entity this becomes a problem. The ORM tries to set the id property value to null and that causes a TypeError:

TypeError: Typed property Entity::$id must be int, null used

vendor/doctrine/orm/lib/Doctrine/ORM/UnitOfWork.php:1246
vendor/doctrine/orm/lib/Doctrine/ORM/UnitOfWork.php:441
vendor/doctrine/orm/lib/Doctrine/ORM/EntityManager.php:376

With this change applied, the default value of the id property 0 is used again.

Solving the problem.

I'm wondering: Does this make any sense? Is this crazy? Am I overlooking something, or is this the solution? 😊

[SenseException]

Thanks for contributing your pull request. I'm not sure about the use case. What is the reason that you prefer to use a 0 valued id instead of a nullable type?

[stof]

@SenseException I would say, to avoid making getId() return a nullable type when any persisted entity would never have null

[SenseException]

In case this is about a check if the entity has an id, 0 !== $entity->getId() can be handled internally in the entity itself with $entity->hasId() or something similar.

[ruudk]

Closing as I lost interesting in solving it this way.... Thanks for the feedback though.