How to enable ENUMs in Symfony 2 / Doctrine

For Symfony 2 projects, add this to the doctrine dbal configuration in app/config.yml:

doctrine:    dbal:        mapping_types:             enum:       string 

My full doctrine config looks like this:

# Doctrine Configurationdoctrine:    dbal:        driver:   %database_driver%        host:     %database_host%        port:     %database_port%        dbname:   %database_name%        user:     %database_user%        password: %database_password%        charset:  UTF8        mapping_types:            enum: string            set: string            varbinary: string            tinyblob: text    orm:        auto_generate_proxy_classes: %kernel.debug%        auto_mapping: true

Code adapted from here

Then run:

app/console doctrine:schema:update --force --dump-sql --ansi

Considering the Doctrine cookbook only provides partial answers as to how to make enums interpret as strings, the following should work regardless of how Doctrine is configured.

The error points you at the name of the file: Doctrine\DBAL\Platforms\MySqlPlatform.php - in there, you'll find that the default list is embedded in the function initializeDoctrineTypeMappings as follows:

$this->doctrineTypeMapping = array(            'tinyint'       => 'boolean',            'smallint'      => 'smallint',            'mediumint'     => 'integer',            'int'           => 'integer',            (...)

Adding simple enum support for all doctrine users, regardless of the rest of the setup, is simply achieved by extending the list with:

'enum' => 'string'