Hello everyone,
I'm new to learning Doctrine, and so far it's been really great! I love how
easy it is to work with entities and have Doctrine map table data to php
classes. I'm looking forward to learning more and seeing how Doctrine can
improve my productivity. That said, there has been one really noticeable
pain point: DQL error messages. When everything works correctly DQL is nice
and convenient. But when DQL fails (or rather when I fail at writing DQL)
the error messages are terrible.
For really obvious mistakes, like when I'm accidentally missing a keyword
like WHERE or FROM, the error message is basically useless. Sure I see
->syntaxError('end of string') in the exception trace, but there's no
information regarding the location of the error. Where exactly is the
unexpected end of the string?
For non-obvious mistakes, where the DQL syntax is correct, but there's a
problem with what I'm asking Doctrine to do, the error messages improve,
but they are still poor. I might see something like semanticalError('line
0, col 61...') that at least gives me an idea as to the location of the
problem. But it would be much better if the error included the problematic
detail directly. Consider the dead simple example "SELECT s.wrong FROM
Submission s", where the "wrong" property doesn't exist for the Submission
entity. Why can't DQL quote that "s.wrong" is the unknown path expression
(or that "wrong" is the unknown property?) instead of making me interpret
Doctrine parser backtraces and look up character offsets?
Those are all simple examples. Right now I'm trying to get a LEFT JOIN
working and I have no idea what I'm doing wrong. I'm certain that it's my
fault (working with databases isn't my regular job) but the DQL error
messages sure aren't helping. It's quoting me a line/col number that puts
the error inside the JOIN keyword; the "col" index is literally between the
"I" and "N" characters! I expect this is due to the fact that my DQL string
is multi-line. I assume my string is collapsed to a single line before
execution, since the error location is always "line 0". Most likely
Doctrine did not adjust its character index to account for the removed
newlines. I can take that into account manually when I count characters,
but this is just another example of poor error reporting wasting my time. I
can give many more examples, and I've only recently started using DQL.
As I mentioned earlier, working with databases isn't what I do most of the
time. But when I've worked with regular SQL the error messages were pretty
good at helping me figure out what I did wrong. An SQL error like "unknown
column 'wrong'" points you right to your mistake. I'd love to see Doctrine
do the same. I think this would go a long way towards making Doctrine more
usable and friendly.
I don't know if this is the best venue for this feedback. If there's a
better way to communicate this issue to the Doctrine team please let me
know. I just want to see the project improved, because so far I see that
it's a very nice tool with a lot of benefits.
Thanks for listening!
~Martin
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