I am using doctrine for ManyToMany relation between Article (owning side) and Tag (reverse side). If I want to un-assign a tag from an article without actually deleting any of them, should I consider joinTable as a standalone entity and remove relationship between article and tag directly from “article_to_tag” table? Or is there a better way?
In theory it should be pretty straight forward. No need to create an intermediate entity. Something like:
$article->getTags()->removeElement($tag);
$em->flush();
More details here: http://docs.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-orm/en/latest/reference/working-with-associations.html#removing-associations
However, there is quite a bit of magic gong on under the hood here and you may run into problems depending on your use case. This article goes into quite a bit of detail on various ways to handle many to many relations in Doctrine 2: http://labs.madisoft.it/orphan-removal-forms-collection-and-collections-elements-swapping-pick-your-poison/
I have been moving away from ORMs and back to plain sql just to deal with some of these sorts of issues.
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