How to change and entity type in Doctrine2 CTI Inheritance

PHP doesn't have support for object casting, so Doctrine doesn't support it. To workaround the problem I write this static method into parent classes:

public static function castToMe($obj) {

    $class = get_called_class();
    $newObj = New $class();

    foreach (get_class_vars(get_class($newObj)) as $property => $value) {
        if (method_exists($obj, 'get' . ucfirst($property)) && method_exists($newObj, 'set' . ucfirst($property))) {
            $newObj->{'set' . ucfirst($property)}($obj->{'get' . ucfirst($property)}());
        }
    }

    return $newObj;
}

You can create this method in class Person and use it to cast from Employe to Client and viceversa:

$employe = New Employe();
$client = Client::castToMe($employe);

Now, if you want, you can remove the $employe entity.

I was looking for this behaviour yesterday also.

In the end, after speaking with people in #doctrine on freenode, I was told that it is not possible.

If you want to do this, then you have to go through this:

Upgrading a User

1. Grab the Person Entity.
2. Update the discrimator column so that it is no longer a 'person' and change it to 'employee'
3. Create a corresponding row inyour Employee table for this inheritance.

Removing Inheritance

Likewise if you want to remove inheritance, you have to..

1. Grab the Person Entity.
2. Update the discrimnator column so that it is no longer an 'employee' and change it to a 'person'.
3. Delete the corresponding row in your Employee table. (Yes you have to delete it, just change the discrimator coumn is not sufficient).

This might be 7 months late, but it is at least the correct answer for anything else looking to suport such a feature.