Ruslan Karimov: Using custom types in Symfony & Doctrine

Ruslan Karimov has written up a post for the 4xxi.com blog covering the use of custom types with Symfony and Doctrine to implement features specific to your database of choice.

ORMs are great. In theory, they insure you against potential changes in your RDBMS and offer an easy plug’n’play solution for integration your domain code with database. In practice, however, since ORMs have to be compatible with all major vendors, their possibilities are often limited. Perks and tricks of specific RDBMS are left out.

One of such perks is so-called range types in PostgreSQL. There are plenty of cases when range types are applicable, but people (in my experience) often stick to old solution with two separate DATETIME columns. Last time I asked a fellow developer about the reason behind it and they said: ‘I use Doctrine in my project, and Doctrine does not support it’. So here we are.

He starts with a brief introduction to a custom type in Doctrine and a ranged type in PostgreSQL. He then shows how to create a custom "DateReangeType" to work with the ranged types and how add it to your Symfony configuration as a custom type. He ends the post with an example of it in use in an entity and in the client code making the database request. Full code can be found in this Github repository.