Running a doctrine:data-load on my Symfony web project’s data/fixtures.yml file and finding an empty database was my latest infuriation. I narrowed it down to some of the data having a Unicode character (the offending letter: ö).

Initially I thought it may be the format that the database was configured to communicate or store in. While the collation was the default latin1_swedish_ci, this isn’t the problem because the collation only defines the rule set by which text is compared. I also found no settings restricting the input or storage form.

The problem was the storage format of the data/fixtures.yml file. Despite my text editor (TextPad in this case) being able to interpret the characters correctly in their 8-bit extended ANSI form, the Doctrine processor does not. You simply must save the file as Unicode format and it will then interpret correctly.

I’ve begun using the Symfony MVC framework for a website I am developing. When trying to perform a doctrine:build to rebuild the database, I was noticing an error:

Initially I was thrown because it writes “Can’t create table” for table that has clearly been created. Also it repeats itself just to make it a little harder to read. This is about adding a foreign key constraint though.

I want to set up my table so that a deletion in the foreign table will set a column to null. In Doctrine YAML this looks like so:

relations:
  MtaUser: { local: author_user_id, foreign: id, onDelete: SET NULL }

From the error output, the reason for the problem wasn’t obvious. It turned out to be that the column had a ‘not null’ attribution. Once this was removed everything was good.

I hope this helps somebody.