symfony - Injecting dependency into entity repository

Question

Is there a simple way to inject a dependency into every repository instance in Doctrine2 ?

I have tried listening to the loadClassMetadata event and using setter injection on the repository but this naturally resulted in a infinite loop as calling getRepository in the event triggered the same event.

After taking a look at the DoctrineORMEntityManager::getRepository method it seems like repositories are not using dependency injection at all, instead they are instantiated at the function level:

public function getRepository($entityName)
{
    $entityName = ltrim($entityName, '\');
    if (isset($this->repositories[$entityName])) {
        return $this->repositories[$entityName];
    }

    $metadata = $this->getClassMetadata($entityName);
    $customRepositoryClassName = $metadata->customRepositoryClassName;

    if ($customRepositoryClassName !== null) {
        $repository = new $customRepositoryClassName($this, $metadata);
    } else {
        $repository = new EntityRepository($this, $metadata);
    }

    $this->repositories[$entityName] = $repository;

    return $repository;
}

Any ideas ?

Answer 1

Problem is that repository classes are not part of the Symfony2 codebase as they are part of Doctrine2, so they do not take advantage of the DIC; this is why you can't go for injection in one place for all repositories.

I would advice you to use a different approach. For example you can create a service layer on top of the repositories and actually inject the class you want through a factory in that layer.

Otherwise you could also define repositories as services this way:

<service id="your_namespace.repository.repos_name"
          class="%your_namespace.repository.repos_name%"
          factory-service="doctrine" factory-method="getRepository">
  <argument>entity_name</argument>
  <argument>entity_manager_name</argument>
  <call method="yourSetter">
      <argument>your_argument</argument>
  </call>
</service>

A solution that could centralize the set method call is to write a DIC tag and a compiler pass to handle it and tag all repository services.