Doctrine inserting NULL values for undefined fields

Question

I don't know if this is a bug, but I am using Doctrine 2.3.0 and I found the persist/flush behaviour quite strange. I have a basic table:

------------------
| test |
------------------
| id INT | AI |
| field1 VARCHAR |
| field2 VARCHAR |
-----------------

When I create an entry by setting only field1:

$test = new Entities\test();
$test->setField1('foo');
$em->persist($test);
$em->flush();

Doctrine\DBAL\Logging\EchoSQLLogger tells me (which is confirmed by looking at the DB) that Doctrine performs the following query:

INSERT INTO test (field1, field2) VALUES (?, ?)
array(2) {
 [1]=>
 string(3) "foo"
 [2]=>
 NULL
}

As you can see, although I haven't set field2, Doctrine does put it in the insert statement with a NULL value.

I have that behaviour for all my entities, which is problematic because when doing inserts, my default DB values for fields I don't set are overwritten by NULL.

Is this the expected default behaviour of Doctrine, is there a way to turn that off (i.e. exclude fields I don't set from the INSERT statements)?

I should probably add that my entities were generated automatically with the reverse engineering, and that the declaration for one of the fields looks like this

/**
 * @var string $field2
 * // removing nullalble makes no diff.
 * @ORM\Column(name="field2", type="string", length=45, nullable=true)
 */
private $field2;
/**
 * Set field2
 *
 * @param string $field2
 * @return Test
 */
public function setField2($field2)
{
 $this->field2 = $field2;
 return $this;
}

Answer 1

I suppose this is default behaviour, as it could be treated logical to create a full record in one INSERT statement. But I could be mistaking. Having some kind of @ORM\Column(type="boolean", columnDefinition="TINYINT(1) NULL DEFAULT 0") could be treated as a hack, but solution. I advise you to review database record insertion logic.

• Max Corbeau: +1 for the hack, I will try it out. Can you clarify what you mean by "I advise you to review database record insertion logic": AFAIK doing partial INSERT (i.e. where not all fields are defined in VALUES) is perfectly legit., so is the use of the DEFAULT constraint on MySQL fields which intended behaviour is to provide a default value for a field when not provided during INSERT/UPDATE: stackoverflow.com/questions/3357953/…. How am I supposed to get the DEFAULT constraint value to actually be used? (instead of NULL as inserted by Doctrine)?
• nefo_x: I was using setting default values for properties in the class. Will check later evening, if won't forget.