May I be the devil's advocate and ask why we just not always use direct queries?

May I be the devil's advocate and ask why we just not always use direct queries?

For me Doctrine has many advantages, amongst which:

• A better DX (developer experience) since you have models to work with.
• Better integration with Symfony (might be considered DX as well).
• Automatic detection of what changed and what queries to run (this is what made this particular thing slow since we have many changes).
• Automatic events for validation, etc.

Having said that, there are clear drawbacks, where speed is the biggest one. For normal pages, and for select queries, this will not be a big issue. But for pages where we do many many queries, it becomes slow.

I wouldn't want to not use it anywhere, since I don't feed DOMjudge is slow in general. However, for controllers that do many queries or are used very often it is worth the investigation to see if we can speed them up with not using Doctrine.

I would argue that a drawback is that even though Doctrine might indeed simplify things and improve DX (not so much the case for me personally), another downside is the added complexity once you move away from standard, simple usage.

We already have a number of places in code where weird hacks are in place. I don't recall all the precise places, but I remember we had some weird stuff in the event handling code, but for example also https://github.com/DOMjudge/domjudge/blob/main/webapp/src/Doctrine/ExternalIdAssigner.php: there's a whole bunch of added complexity on top of simple SQL, which actually start to make the code more difficult to understand, and act at a distance, so naively looking at the code it is not clear what's going on under the hood.

I wonder for that specific case, where we want to assign some field to all entities we insert in the database, how you would do that when not using events, an ORM, or a framework. Call a function in every place where you insert (which is prone to forgetting it), create a helper method that does the insert (which we could do instead of this with Doctrine as well but it means changing many, many places to use that helper) or something else?
I'm not saying this is the best way to do it or it is the most clear way, but I'm not sure what is. If there is a better way, I'm all for it.
I still remember the "good" old days with lib.db.php and its logic and I really disliked that, for me that was way less easy to use than something like Doctrine in 95% of the cases. But this is of course my opinion and you will have a different one, so maybe we can find some middle ground?

I wonder for that specific case, where we want to assign some field to all entities we insert in the database, how you would do that when not using events, an ORM, or a framework. Call a function in every place where you insert (which is prone to forgetting it), create a helper method that does the insert (which we could do instead of this with Doctrine as well but it means changing many, many places to use that helper) or something else? I'm not saying this is the best way to do it or it is the most clear way, but I'm not sure what is. If there is a better way, I'm all for it. I still remember the "good" old days with lib.db.php and its logic and I really disliked that, for me that was way less easy to use than something like Doctrine in 95% of the cases. But this is of course my opinion and you will have a different one, so maybe we can find some middle ground?

I understand your point, and I wouldn't mind this if it was only the 95% of cases. The problem I feel is the other 5% and especially the complexity overhead that gives. I'm not sure a discussion about this in a PR will be very helpful, so maybe better to look at this during a hackathon or so.

Agreed. Let's look at this PR without this huge discussion, since I think this is an improvement regardless