Automatically getting a query instead of a result set in Symfony

In my schema, a user is related to their questions.

I want to display all questions asked by a user.

I also want this page to be paginated using sfDoctrinePager which requires a Doctrine_Query as a parameter.

I know I can call $my_user->getQuestions() to get all questions from my_user, but is there a way to get the query to get all these questions instead? Something like $my开发者_运维百科_user->getQuestionsQuery() for example.

Or do I have to implement it myself?

It seems that you have to create a Doctrine_Query object manually:

$query = new Doctrine::getTable('Question')->createQuery('q')
     ->where('q.uid = ?', $my_user->getId());

And then pass it to pager:

$this->pager = new sfDoctrinePager('Question', $max_per_page);
$this->pager->setQuery($query);
$this->pager->setPage($cur_page);
$this->pager->init();

Congratulations! You have ready to use specialized queries. These are just descendants of Doctrine_Query but with your own shortcut methods. There's article written by Nicolas Perriault called "Optimize your Doctrine Workflow with Specialized Queries", which describes this technique more verbosely.