How to merge two entities into one?

Question

symfony

There are two entities, one in the database, the other comes from the client. How to combine these two entities into one so that the entity that came from the client updates the entity received from the database, but only with those properties that are not NULL for the client (coming) entity?

Answer 1

Found a solution through the Serializer component. It was updated in 2.7, where they added the option that is needed. Thanks to all!

Answer 2

Use DI

Answer 3

the other comes from the client

umm.... with an external API? Or from the client through Request? if the latter, then it is not an entity, it is just some data.
In general, something like this:
1) we take the data from the request and make it a DTO (just some kind of object with fields, you can use public ones to make it easier, you can generally just use arrays or stdClass).
2) validate this DTO
3) if everything is fine, either we have a service that can update the entity through setters, or the entity has a method updateFromDTO($dto);
something like this.