Best Practices
==============

Here are some best practices you can follow when working with the Doctrine MongoDB ODM.

Don't use public properties on documents
----------------------------------------

It is very important that you don't map public properties on
documents, but only protected or private ones. The reason for this
is simple, whenever you access a public property of a proxy object
that hasn't been initialized yet the return value will be null.
Doctrine cannot hook into this process and magically make the
document lazy load.

This can create situations where it is very hard to debug the
current failure. We therefore urge you to map only private and
protected properties on documents and use getter methods or magic
\_\_get() to access them.

Constrain relationships as much as possible
-------------------------------------------

It is important to constrain relationships as much as possible. This means:

-  Impose a traversal direction (avoid bidirectional associations if possible)
-  Eliminate nonessential associations

This has several benefits:

-  Reduced coupling in your domain model
-  Simpler code in your domain model (no need to maintain bidirectionality properly)
-  Less work for Doctrine

Use events judiciously
----------------------

The event system of Doctrine is great and fast. Even though making
heavy use of events, especially lifecycle events, can have a
negative impact on the performance of your application. Thus you
should use events judiciously.

Use cascades judiciously
------------------------

Automatic cascades of the persist/remove/merge/etc. operations are
very handy but should be used wisely. Do NOT simply add all
cascades to all associations. Think about which cascades actually
do make sense for you for a particular association, given the
scenarios it is most likely used in.

Don't use special characters
----------------------------

Avoid using any non-ASCII characters in class, field, table or
column names. Doctrine itself is not unicode-safe in many places
and will not be until PHP itself is fully unicode-aware (PHP6).

Initialize collections in the constructor
-----------------------------------------

It is recommended best practice to initialize any business
collections in documents in the constructor.

Example:

.. code-block:: php

    <?php

    namespace MyProject\Model;

    use Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection;
    
    class User
    {
        private $addresses;
        private $articles;
    
        public function __construct()
        {
            $this->addresses = new ArrayCollection;
            $this->articles = new ArrayCollection;
        }
    }