Symfony | Doctrine Help Needed - Inserting in Multiple Tables

This question is not a symfony question, it's a doctrine question. First of all you should not ask yourself "how will the database look like?". The better question is: "How are products and gateways associated?"

As I understand your post: - Many products can have many gateways.

So we're talking about a many-to-many association. That's the reason why you need ("how will the database look like?") a third table that associates both tables. But we need to answer the second question ("How are products and gateways associated?") Answer: They are associated via a many-to-many association.

How is this achieved in doctrine?

/**
* @ORM\Entity()
*/
class Product{
    /*
    * @ORM\ManyToMany(targetEntity="Gateway", inversedBy="products")
    */
    private $gateways;
    //adder + setter + getter
}

/**
* @ORM\Entity()
*/
class Gateway{
    /*
    * @ORM\ManyToMany(targetEntity="Product", mappedBy="gateways")
    */
    private $products;
    //adder + setter + getter
}

To schema update do php app/console doctrine:schema:update --force in your cmd (app root dir)

This is the way, doctrine solves the problem. Nice, isn't it?

Your second question was: How can I CRUD with the entities?

Let's say your coding in a controller. You database has no products, but 5 gateways (ids 1-5)

class someController extends Controller {
    public function doSomeCrud(){
        $em = $this -> get('doctrine.orm.entity_manager');
        $product = new Product();
        $someGateway = $em -> find('NAMESPACE\Gateway',3);
        $anotherGateway = $em -> find('NAMESPACE\Gateway',5);
        $product -> addGateway($someGateway) -> addGateway($anotherGateway);
        $em -> persist($product);
        $em -> flush();
    }
}

After calling the method, your database will look like:

Product: 1

Gateway: 1;2;3;4;5

Product_Gateway:(1,1,3);(2,1,5)

You can get all gateways of a product via

$product -> getGateways();

and update a product via:

$product -> getGateways() -> first() -> setName('new name');
$em -> flush();

The entity manager recognized that the name of gateway 3 has changed and makes a UPDATE Gateway set name='new name' WHERE id = 3

What you are still missing are the setters and getters (example for product -> gateways):

public function addGateway(GatewayInterface $gateway){
    $this -> gateways -> add($gateway);
    return $this;
}

public function setGateways(Collection $gateway){
    $this -> gateways = $gateways;
    return $this;
}

public function getGateways(){
    return $this -> gateways;
}

You need to create the GatewayInterface first to get it work. And you need the same setters / getters for gateway -> products

Index action (create a product) must look like this:

public function indexAction()
{
    $em = $this->getDoctrine()->getManager();
    $product = new ShopProducts();
    $em -> persist($product);
    $gateway = new GlobalGateways();
    $em -> persist($gateway);
    $product -> addGateway($gateway);
    $em -> flush();
}

Note: You should always name your classes in singular. So it would be better if the names were "Product" and "GlobalGateway"