Access properties of Entities - shopware

Question

I'm getting all active countries via the service id country.repository
public function getCountries(Context $context): EntityCollection
{
$criteria = new Criteria();
$criteria->addFilter(new EqualsFilter('active', true));
return $this->countryRepository->search($criteria, $context)->getEntities();
}
This gives me this CountryCollection:
How can I access each element to get the id and the name?
I tried to loop over
public function test($context): array
{
$countryIds = $this->getCountries($context);
$ids = [];
foreach ($countryIds as $countryId) {
$ids[] = $countryId['id'];
}
return $ids;
}
Obviously this doesn't work. It gives this error:
Cannot use object of type Shopware\Core\System\Country\CountryEntity
as array

Answer 1

If you are only interested in the ids of the countries you can use
$criteria = new Criteria();
$criteria->addFilter(new EqualsFilter('active', true));
$ids = $this->countryRepository->searchIds($criteria, $context)->getIds();
searchIds() will only return the ids of the entities and not all of their properties, the benefit is that not all values have to be loaded from the DB and hydrated, therefore searchIds() is faster then the normal search().

Answer 2

You need to call the function like this
public function test($context): array
{
$countries = $this->getCountries($context);
$ids = [];
foreach ($countries as $country) {
$ids[] = $country->getId();//or $country->getName()
}
return $ids;
}
Usually you need to open the entity file. In your case it is CountryEntity.php to check the function to get the id or other fields there.