Shopware: Save new entity – don’t use getVars()

I’m a Magento developer and therefore I save entities. I’m used to it and using a class to set all properties on it is a great way to interact with an entity.

Shopware doesn’t. To create a new entity you call create on a repository and pass an array to it.

Like this example from the docs:

 $this->productRepository->create([
    [
        'name' => 'Example product',
        'productNumber' => 'SW123',
        'stock' => 10,
        'taxId' => $this->getTaxId($context),
        'price' => [['currencyId' => Defaults::CURRENCY, 'gross' => 50, 'net' => 25, 'linked' => false]],
    ]
], $context);

So, what is the problem with my approach?

What IS my approach actually?

$doc = new \Shopware\Core\Checkout\Document\DocumentEntity();
$doc->setOrder($order);
$doc->setOrderId($orderId);
$doc->setFileType($fileType);
$doc->setDeepLinkCode($deepLinkCode);

$this->documentRepository->create($doc->getVars(), $context);

This throws a ton of errors, e.g.

[2023-03-14T18:22:33.836634+00:00] winkelwagen.importinvoices.EMERGENCY: There are 4 error(s) while writing data. 1. [/] Expected data to be array. 1. [/] Expected data to be array. 1. [/] Expected data to be array. 1. [/] Expected data to be array. [] []

Beside the fact, that these error messages are horrible and meaningless, what they say is “You tried to save something which doesn’t have the expected format”.

To save an order for example you need to define the id:

['id' => $order->getId()]

$doc->getVars() does extract all properties from the entity, but unfortunately doesn’t call getVars recursively on all object which are inside of the entity. And as you can expect an OrderEntity is no array ?.

Solution: Don’t use getVars(), but build your arrays from hand.

This can make also in future huge difference when you update only the difference or all properties. There are ideas to run indexers based on changes

— Shyim (@Shyim97) March 23, 2023

Yep that's why shopware DAL is not a fully fledged ORM, it does not track changesets in entities or allow to write entities back.

Also even if you find a way that would work it might be dangerous as you would write the whole entity again thus maybe overwriting concurrent changes

— jelfering (@j_elfering) March 23, 2023