doctrine-fixtures-foundry_skill

Overview

This skill helps evolve Symfony Doctrine models and database schema safely, focusing on integrity, performance, and controlled rollout. It guides Doctrine fixtures and Foundry tasks to design relations, tune queries, and verify lifecycle behavior. The goal is reliable migrations and predictable runtime behavior.

How this skill works

It inspects entity ownership and cardinality, identifies risky mapping changes, and recommends migration strategies that avoid destructive jumps. It highlights hot-path fetch/query patterns to eliminate N+1s and over-fetching, and proposes targeted tests to validate lifecycle callbacks and transactional boundaries. The skill outputs concrete entity/migration changes, performance decisions, and rollback notes.

When to use it

• Designing or changing entity relations and ownership semantics
• Planning schema evolution or database migrations for production
• Improving Doctrine query performance and eliminating N+1s
• Creating or refining doctrine fixtures and Foundry factories for tests
• Validating lifecycle callbacks, transactional boundaries, and integrity constraints

Best practices

• Keep owning and inverse sides coherent; model a single source of truth for relations
• Apply migration safety: break large destructive changes into smaller, reversible steps
• Tune fetch strategies only for identified hot paths; measure before optimizing
• Write targeted tests that exercise lifecycle events and transactional boundaries
• Avoid over-fetching by projecting required fields and using joins/partial objects

Example use cases

• Convert a ManyToMany with payload into an explicit join entity with clear ownership and migration plan
• Refactor eager fetches causing high memory use into optimized queries with pagination and explicit joins
• Add a new non-nullable column: implement backfill migration, deploy code to write defaults, then make column non-nullable
• Detect and fix accidental N+1s introduced by a new relation used in API endpoints
• Create Foundry factories and fixtures that mirror production constraints for reliable integration tests