Updating Entities When an Insert Has a Duplicate Key in Doctrine ORM

There may be times when Doctrine may or may not know if an entity already exists in your database. Doctrine ORM provides a handy way to merge an entity to the database, meaning that it will insert any new entities, and update any existing ones.

Most PHP developers come from a MySQL background, where you can simply use ‘ON DUPLICATE KEY’ to achieve this:

INSERT INTO table (id, value) values('test', 'TEST') ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE value = values(name)

Unfortunately, because Doctrine is database agnostic, this will not work when using DQL. Instead, Doctrine ORM provides a handy way of achieving this within the ORM:

$entity = new Table();
$entity->setId(1);
$entity->setValue('TEST');

// If an entity with ID 1 already exists, this will update it, otherwise it will insert it
$entityManager->merge($entity);
$entityManager->flush();