Doctrine one-to-many association: Issues with composite primary key - mysql

Question

I am trying to populate the below one-to-many doctrine association however I am hitting a problem because every Customer (primary key: id) has their visits (primary key: customer_id & visitday) captured in the Visit table (I am deriving visitday as the number of days since 1st Jan 2000 before persisting to the database (since datetime objects can not be in the primary key)):
Entities
class Customer
{
/**
* #ORM\Column(type="integer", options={"unsigned"=true})
* #ORM\Id
* #ORM\GeneratedValue(strategy="AUTO")
*/
protected $id;
/**
* #ORM\OneToMany(targetEntity="Visit", mappedBy="visitday")
*/
protected $visits;
public function __construct()
{
$this->visits = new ArrayCollection();
}
/* -- */
}
Class Visit
{
/**
* #ORM\Column(name="customer_id", type="integer", options={"unsigned"=true})
* #ORM\JoinColumn(name="customer_id", referencedColumnName="id")
* #ORM\Id
*/
private $customer;
/**
* #ORM\Column(type="smallint")
* #ORM\ManyToOne(targetEntity="Customer", inversedBy="visits")
* #ORM\JoinColumn(name="visitday", referencedColumnName="id")
* #ORM\Id
*/
protected $visitday;
/* -- */
}
My problem is that my Customer objects are not getting populated with the customer's corresponding visits. I assume this is because doctrine can't see that it should also include its own customer ID in the lookup. Is there a way to fix this?

Answer 1

I would recommend you to change $visitday attribute to DateTime. It will be your visit date timestamp. Then customer attribute should be inversed with visits.
/**
* #ORM\Column(name="customer_id", type="integer", options={"unsigned"=true})
* #ORM\ManyToOne(targetEntity="Customer", inversedBy="visits")
* #ORM\Id
*/
private $customer;
And as an option you could change relation Customer to Visits as ManyToMany. So you wont have duplicate visit dates.