 <p>In symfony, you only have to persist a new entity. If you update an existing entity found by your entity manager and then flush, your entity will be updated in database even if you didn't persist it.</p> <p>Edit : you can detach an entity from the entity manager before flushing it using this line of code :</p> <pre><code>$em-&gt;detach($formModelEntity); </code></pre>