Use PHP Enums as Doctrine type in Symfony

credit: sensiolabs tweet

PHP 8.1 adds support for Enumerations. An Enumeration, is an enumerated type that has a fixed number of possible values. (see more details)

✍🏻 In this article, I’ll show you how to use an Enum as a doctrine WITHOUT adding configuration.

First, what is a doctrine type?

📕In short, a doctrine type is a type used to convert a PHP value to a database platform and the inverse. A type should have a class that implements 2 methods convertToDatabaseValue and convertToPHPValue.

Adding a custom type in a Symfony application is easy and very well documented, I tried quickly to implement an enum type and then tweeted my approach, my goal was to have use autoconfiguration to not have to declare each type in configuration.

As I write these lines the Enums type doesn’t exists yet let’s start our journey to implement it with our hands 🙌.

💡The hack to bypass the configuration is to autoconfigure a base EnumType and then extend it anytime we need to refer to a new Enum class.

1- Create the Enum

2- Create the Base enum type that should be extended when we need an enum type.

The conversion is simple:

PHP Enum <=> String in database

3- Autoconfigure our base AbstractEnumType

(If you’re not familiar with _instanceof check the doc)

# services.yaml
services:
  _instanceof:
    App\DoctrineType\AbstractEnumType:
        tags: ['app.doctrine_enum_type']

4- Create the StatusType that convert the enum Status to a database value…