php - Generating entities from database

Question

I'm trying to generate entities in symfony2 from an existing empty database (quite large and it would be real pain to create entities from scratch). Sadly, I've encountered rather big problem.

When I try to call the following command (on windows if it changes anything):

php app/console doctrine:mapping:convert --force --from-database annotation ./src/GOutside/GOBundle/Resources/config/doctrine

I got following message:

No Metadata Classes to process.

Before posting I've:

• Validated that my configuration is ok (I can connect to database),
• My bundle is created and path specified above is valid
• Same thing happens when I try to convert to xml/yml as when I try to generate annotation mapping.

Symfony version is 2.4.4, php version is 5.5.3.

Thanks for help in advance :)

Edit after xiidea reply

When I try to use

php app/console doctrine:mapping:import --force GOBundle xml

as suggested by @xiidea, I got following message:

Database does not have any mapping information.

Answer 1

Your case is well documented in symfony website titled "How to generate Entities from an Existing Database"

As the documentation stated:

The first step towards building entity classes from an existing database is to ask Doctrine to introspect the database and generate the corresponding metadata files. Metadata files describe the entity class to generate based on table fields.

Using following command (assuming your bundle's short name is GOutsideGOBundle)

$ php app/console doctrine:mapping:import --force GOutsideGOBundle xml

Then you need to call.

php app/console doctrine:generate:entities GOutsideGOBundle

If you need to generate entity classes with annotation mappings, then you have to execute the following command before doctrine:generate:entities

php app/console doctrine:mapping:convert annotation ./src

Path should be only ./src instead of ./src/GOutside/GOBundle/Resources/config/doctrine

Updated:

If everything is correct in your configuration then getting the error Database does not have any mapping information. is unlikely!! I am not sure about this error. But as per your database table schema, there are some issue which will prevent you from creating mapping information.

1. Your table contain special type point which doctrine can't handle.
2. You database table has multiple table without any primary key. Doctrine does not support reverse engineering from tables that don't have a primary key

To solve problem (1) you can add a custom mapping in your doctrine config section. For example to map the point type as string you can write:

doctrine:
    dbal:
        //Other connection parameters
        mapping_types:
            point: string

for the second problem you need to define primary key for those tables, those could be new field or could be composite primary key.