I'm currently working on a project with symfony 1.4 and Doctrine 1.2. I'm looking for a proper way to do logging from the model layer. In some model classes I use the record hook postSave() to create a ZIP file using exec() (since PHP zip doesn't provide for storage method 'Stored'). To be sure that everythings works fine I check the return code and log an error if something goes wrong. My first naive approach was to do it like this: if ($returnCode != 0) { sfContext::getInstance()->getLogger()->debug(...); } As you know, this doesn't work so well because sfContext belongs to the controller layer and shouldn't be used from the model layer. My next try was to use the model's constructor to pass in an sfLogger instance, but this doesn't work due to Doctrine 1.2 reserving the constructor for internal use (Doctrine 1.2 Documentation). I'm looking forward for your suggestions!