I am often importing data into a symfony project from an existing site or a CSV file and re-writing this data into the fixtures.yml is usually too complicated or time consuming so I end up writing bespoke import actions.
While I am writing these actions I often find that I have to delete the contents of the MySQL tables as you can never write the routine complete and accurate in one go so as you build it up in smaller steps you find that you have to get rid of the previously old data.
This presented me with 2 problems:-
- Using DELETE FROM [TABLENAME] does not reset the auto-incrementing fields so if you have anything that is based on the id during the rest of the import then you’re going to have issues.
- There is a lot of clicking in phpMyAdmin to empty the tables, especially if you forget about the foreign key relationships.
