I find that when developing I would normally use some other tool, such as phpmyadmin, to modify the structure of an existing database that I am using in a Symfony project.

These are the steps to update the Symfony data model code generated from an acompanying MySql database. I find I have to run these steps often while developing the application.

Assuming you are shelled into the root of your application directory. Also assumes that propel.ini points to your database.

1) We generate the schema using step 1.

This will generate the schema.yml file in your app/config directory.

2) While YML is nice, we really need XML so, we use this step 2command.

Again, this is quite verbose and not really human readable.

3) Finally, generate the code we use in base and peer classes using step 3.

The actual database access layer code is generated in the app/lib/model directory with names like Tablename.php and TablenamePeer.php. You normally use these objects for all database access.

This also generates all the BaseTablename.php and BaseTablenamePeer.php files in your app/lib/model/om directory. These are used as base classes in the previous code set.

This the first of a series of shorts on developing in Symfony