My name is
Jurgens du Toit.
Systems Developer.
Problem Solver.
About Me
Technology and Solving Problems are my passion. I'm a South African that loves my wife, life, and coding.
Populate a Symfony 2 Form with the referring entity
By Jurgens du Toit
In any web project it often happens that you have an entity, say a Group, to which you want to add a linked entity, say a Student. So you’ll have a “Add a Student” link on the page displaying the Group. When your users click through, there’s probably a dropdown with the different groups, and your users expect the Group they’re coming from to be prepopulated.
There’s various ways to do this, but I’d like to show you a simple, non intrusive one for Symfony 2. You don’t have to add any parameters to the link, it just works. In your Student Controller, the newAction method:
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<?php
// src/My/Bundle/Controller/StudentController.php
public function newAction()
{
$entity = new Student();
$form = $this->createForm(new StudentType(), $entity);
// Get the refering URL Path
$ref = str_replace("app_dev.php/", "", parse_url($request->headers->get('referer'),PHP_URL_PATH ));
// Get the matching route
$route = $this->container->get('router')->match($ref);
if (empty($route['_route']) === false && $route['_route'] === 'group_show') {
// Find the referring group
if ($group = $this->get('doctrine')->getRepository('MyBundle:Group')->findOneById($route['id'])) {
$form->get('group')->setData($group);
}
}
return $this->render('MyBundle:Student:new.html.twig', array(
'entity' => $entity,
'form' => $form->createView(),
));
}
?>
We basically try and match the referring URL to a route, and if found, retrieve that entity, and set it in the form. Simple!