Something strange with blank fields in symfony2 forms - forms

Question

when i send a form with a blank field i get an error SQLSTATE[23000]: Integrity constraint violation: 1048 Column 'image' cannot be null. the only way to fix it that i found is to make a default value in the entity file:
* #ORM\Column(type="string", length=100)
*/
protected $image="";
and change the setter like this:
public function setImage($image){
if(!isset($image)) {
//its really empty but it works only in this way
}
else {
$this->image = $image;
}
I think that it is very starnge...
Is there any explanation for this? And is there another way to do it?
}

Answer 1

If the field image is not required, you can set it as nullable so Doctrine will know that and will set the column as being nullable.
This way, constraint won't be violated since the field can be null. To make a field nullable with Doctrine annotation, just add nullable = true in the ORM\Column definition like this:
#ORM\Column(type="string", length=100, nullable=true)
By default, all columns are nullable=false so they will throw a constaint validation exception when trying to persist a null value in it.
Regards,
Matt

Answer 2

The why is partially answered here:
Symfony2 forms interpret blank strings as nulls
This code gets around it because when Symfony sets $image to null and calls $entity->setImage(null), this code will not change the $image member.
public function setImage($image){
if(!isset($image)) {
// $image is null, symfony was trying to set $this->image to null, prevent it
} else {
$this->image = $image;
}
}
This is more explicit (and who wants that weird empty statement anyway?). It expresses your intent, that $this->image cannot be null (which matches the database definition if you don't make it nullable)
public function setImage($image){
if(isset($image)) {
// $image not null, go ahead and use it
$this->image = $image;
}
}
Either way, you need to initialize $this->image otherwise it will default to null.