“Smart” Accessor in Doctrine Entity

Easily add some logic to filter out specific entities from an ArrayCollection in Symfony2. In this simple example, I wrote an app that had Node, and Comment entities separately, as well as an explicitly defined NodeComment entity. In my Node entity, I want to serialize all of the associated comments. But rather than call ->getNodeComments() and then filter in AngularJS (or Twig, or whatever else for that matter), I just want to know that my object node.comments are the actual comments I care about.

The Entity property

/**
 * @Expose
 * @AccessType("getComments")
 */
protected $node_comments;

The Accessor

/**
 * @return array
 */
public function getComments()
{
    $comments = new \Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection();
    foreach($this->node_comments as $nodeComment) {
        $comments->add($nodeComment->getComment());
    }
    return $comments;
}

Now, my serialized object.comments are the actual comments, instead of the ManyToMany Entity.