Doctrine Fetch Modes (Symfony)

Use when

• Designing entity relations or schema evolution.
• Improving Doctrine correctness/performance.

Default workflow

1. Model ownership/cardinality and transactional boundaries.
2. Apply mapping/schema changes with migration safety.
3. Tune fetch/query behavior for hot paths.
4. Verify lifecycle behavior with targeted tests.

Guardrails

• Keep owning/inverse sides coherent.
• Avoid destructive migration jumps in one release.
• Eliminate accidental N+1 and over-fetching.

Progressive disclosure

• Use this file for execution posture and risk controls.
• Open references when deep implementation details are needed.

Output contract

• Entity/migration changes.
• Integrity and performance decisions.
• Validation outcomes and rollback notes.

References

• reference.md
• docs/complexity-tiers.md