Symfony2 QueryBuilder join ON and WITH difference

@florian gave you the correct answer but let me try to explain it on example:

In sql, joins are done like this:

SELECT * FROM category    LEFT JOIN product ON product.category_id = category.id

(or something like this)

Now in Doctrine, you don't need to use ON clause because doctrine knows that from relations annotations in your entities. So above example would be:

// CategoryRepository.phppublic function getCategoriesAndJoinProducts() {    return $this->createQueryBuilder("o")        ->leftJoin("o.products", "p")->addSelect("p")         ->getQuery()->getResult() ;}

Both would fetch all categories and join products associated with them.

Now comes the WITH clause. If you want to join only products with price bigger than 50, you would do this in SQL:

SELECT * FROM category    LEFT JOIN product ON product.category_id = category.id AND product.price>50

In Doctrine:

// CategoryRepository.phppublic function getCategoriesAndJoinProductsWithPriceBiggerThan($price) {    return $this->createQueryBuilder("o")        ->leftJoin("o.products", "p", "WITH", "p.price>:price")            ->setParameter("price", price)->addSelect("p")         ->getQuery()->getResult() ;}

So, in reality you should never, ever use ON if you are using Doctrine. If you have a need for something like that, you can be almost sure that you screwed something else.

In theory, ON permits you to give the full join criterias, while WITH permits to add additional criterias to the default ones (IMHO).

But, what DQL permits is to avoid giving the JOIN criterias:

You just have to say: $qb->leftJoin('prod.pdata', 'pdata');

And doctrine2 will handle the join correctly.

Here is a related question about that: Can I use "ON" keyword in DQL or do I need to use Native Query?