Error message with potential room for improvement

[bgwines]

This concerns the error message

PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught exception 'MongoException' with message 'zero-length keys are not allowed, did you use $ with double quotes?'

I believe in all of the three following scenarios:

• If you have an @ODM\EmbeddedDocument with an @ODM\Field ivar with a type="hash" annotation but it's actually set to an array-like associative array (integer keys, contiguous from 0 to some n)
• The reverse case: if you have an @ODM\EmbeddedDocument with an @ODM\Field ivar with a type="collection" annotation but it's actually set to a map-like associative array
• If you have an @ODM\EmbeddedDocument with an @ODM\Field ivar with a type="collection" annotation, and fill it with @ODM\EmbeddedDocuments (instead of annotating it with @ODM\EmbedMany) (not 100% this is the exception thrown in this case but I think so?)

It would be nice if the exception were to detail which instance variable is the offending one, in which class -- as it currently stands, it's rather unhelpful and time-consuming to debug.

Given how PHP associative arrays unfortunately basically don't distinguish at all between being maps or arrays, as you probably know, it's a pretty easy mistake to make to think you have an array and it's actually map (or the opposite), since it's not enforced at the type level.

Thanks for your attention to this matter! :)

[bgwines-shmoop]

Whoops; typo:

*I believe it occurs in all [...]

Also, this is in Doctrine 1.0.5, by the way. Thanks!

[alcaeus]

The error message you're quoting actually comes from deeper down the stack, I'm not sure if it's the driver or server throwing that error. I'll mark it down as an idea, maybe we can fix some occurences by doing proper type checks.

[malarzm]

I believe the problem is that @ODM\EmbeddedDocument is combined with @ODM\Field and because of that strange things are happening. IMO the proper resolution is to fix the mapping (one applied latest should win).

Offhand both @ODM\EmbedMany and @ODM\ReferenceMany can be associative collections if you set strategy to either set or atomicSet.