Alejandro Celaya has a post to his site showing you how to work with custom types in Doctrine, more specifically with the "enum" type.

Doctrine is currently the most used ORM in PHP. It makes it very easy to work with databases in an object oriented way. It comes with a set of built-in column types that map database types with PHP types. For example, the datetime column type, persists the value of an entity column as a datetime in the database and handles it as a DateTime object when the entity is hydrated.

Type conversions work both ways, so column types take care of casting database to PHP types and vice versa. In this article I'm going to explain how to define custom column types so that we can persist our own objects into the database and hydrate them back.

He points out that, while PHP itself lacks the "enum" data type, you can simulate it with a library like this. He uses this library to create a custom Doctrine object type that mimic enums in the getting and setting of a value to one of a few options. In this case it's values representing the CRUD methods. He shows the code to link the Type back to the Action which then gives it understanding of what the valid enum values can be. He also points out another package that he published recently that takes some of the work out of creating the boilerplate code for the enum.