Auto-set the Owner: Entity Listener

Hi,

Do you have a NotNull constraint on User field? I think it's a little complex problem because Validation is called before any Doctrine Listener that changes data before persisting, so the easiest way to get it work, you should add a ValidatorInterface service to your Listener and call validate manually after setting the user. You should take validator service from ApiPlatform package. In this case you will have a proper validation exception 'cause ValidatorInterface::validate in this case will do all work automaticaly!

Cheers

Hi thank you for your reply
I am a completly noob can uou show how and where i can add this interface ? I tried inside the listener but could'nt manage to make it work :(

Heh, but you are on chapter 36 of ApiPlatform course ;) you should know how to autowire services ;)

namespace App\Listeners;

use ApiPlatform\Validator\ValidatorInterface;
// ...

class YourDoctrineListener //...
{
    private ValidatorInterface $validator;

    public function __construct(ValidatorInterface $validator)
    {
        $this->validator = $validator;
    }

    public function prePersist(/*...*/)
    {
        // ...
        $this->validator->validate($entity)
    }
    
    // ....
}

This is a small example, it's hard to say how exactly you should use it, because I don't see your code, but it should be easy to inject anywhere!

Cheers!

Hi,
Thank you for your reply.
It was as simple as that. I tried the same thing but i probably messed it up somewhere.

it's working like a charm. Thank you.

Hey ahmedbhs

I'm glad to hear you are liking our content. About your question, the prePersist event is only fired when a new entity is saved in the database for the first time. And, the preUpdate event is fired every time an entity is updated in the database, that's just how Doctrine events works.

Cheers!

Hey Mees E.!

Yes, actually. The listener is running AFTER validation, so we're setting the owner and it's saving, without any validation. For our example, that works fine: we don't need to run IsValidOwner() because that checks to see if the owner === the current user, for when we're doing an edit. But for a create, it's always valid to set the owner to the currently-authenticated user. So no validation needed. And for UniqueEntity, it's just not something we need here.

> For example I want to check if the userID is unique

Let's see if we can figure this out :). One option would be to use the listener, and then execute validation yourself. Do that by injecting the ValidatorInterface service and calling validate. That will return a ConstraintViolationList. If that has any validations errors in it, throw the special ValidationException. You're basically repeating what Api Platform does for its own validation layer: https://github.com/api-plat...

Let me know if that helps!

Cheers!

Thank you for responding! That should work!

Just for extra information: Are there any best practices on validating OneToOne relations without throwing a 500 error? This solution should work but does sound like there's a better option.

Thanks!

Hey Mees E.!

Hmm. In general, I think UniqueEntity should work for this... I can't think of a reason why it wouldn't. BUT, that's assuming that you aren't using a listener to set the owner like this: that assumes that you are just allowing the user to send data, and you want to guarantee that there isn't already a record in the database with the same user. I could be wrong, as I rarely use OneToOne, but I think that in the "normal data setting situation", UniqueEntity should catch it.

Cheers!

Hey Stephane,

If you want to use that new PHP property types feature - yes, you have to :) It's tricky because we need to allow putting the entity into invalid state to validate it. Thanks for sharing your solution with others

Cheers!

Hey André P.

Yes, you're right. The DataPersister is a layer inside ApiPlatform, so, if you save an entity out of ApiPlatform, as far as I know, its DataPersister won't be called. My recomendation here is to use your API to create your entities, instead of having 2 different ways for creating those, it avoids code duplication and may simplify your logic

Cheers!

Hey @adam!

Excellent question :). No need to duplicate the listener. What you can do is this:

A) Create an interface with a setOwner(User $user) method. Make all your entities that need this "set owner functionality" have this. Maybe the interface is called "SettableOwnerInterface".

B) Create an entity listener just like in this video, but use the SettableOwnerInterface type-hint on the prePersist() argument. Because, once you're done, this method will receive one of multiple different objects.

C) Register your entity listener on all the entity classes that you need.

That should do it! Btw, if you used a Doctrine event subscriber that's called on prePersist() of *all* entities, then you could skip step (C) and instead just check of the entity being passed to your method is an instance of SettableOwnerInterface.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Cheers!

Hi Cameron,

Thank you for your feedback!

Cheers!

Oh well I by now found out it was a problem related to phpmailer, not to my entitylistener so not so much related to the course!

In case anyone ever comes by this question with a similar issue:

The debug server of php mailer injected data in my response, malforming my entire response. simply removing the debugserver made everything work as expected :)

Hey Wannes,

Glad you were able to solve this problem yourself, well done! And thank you for sharing your solution with others!

Cheers!