Changing a Doctrine connection with the same name in single instance

On one of our projects that we use multiple connections that are defined at run time we recently were generating reports that required us to change a specific connection multiple times in a single run. We noticed that even though we would define a new connection, it would not throw any errors but just continue to use the originally defined connection. Here is how we were doing the connections:

<?php
$databaseManager = sfContext::getInstance()->getDatabaseManager();
$manager=Doctrine_Manager::getInstance();
$newConn = new sfDoctrineDatabase(array('dsn'=>'XXX','name'=> 'ExampleName'));
$newConn->connect();
$databaseManager->setDatabase('ExampleName',$newConn);

If you called the code above once, it would connect properly to the given DSN. However if you then called it a second time with a new DSN, it would not error and would simply just remain connected to the first DSN. After hunting around a bit it was the problem that Doctrine wasn’t assigning the new connection as the old connection was still open. To get around this we updated the code to the following:

<?php

$databaseManager = sfContext::getInstance()->getDatabaseManager();
$manager=Doctrine_Manager::getInstance();

// If the Doctrine Manager has the connection already close it so the new connection can be established
if($manager->contains('ExampleName'))
        $manager->closeConnection($manager->getConnection('ExampleName'));
$newConn = new sfDoctrineDatabase(array('dsn'=>'XXX','name'=> 'ExampleName'));
$newConn->connect();
$databaseManager->setDatabase('ExampleName',$newConn);

You need to first check to see if the Doctrine Manager has the connection, as if you try to get a connection that doesn’t exist, it will throw an exception.

Hope this saves you some time!