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19.

configureCrud()

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If you look at the index page of any of the crud sections, it doesn't sort by default. It just... lists things in whatever order they come out of the database. It would nice to change that: to sort by a specific column whenever we go to a section.

So far, we've talked about configuring assets, fields and actions. But "how a crud section sorts"... doesn't fall into any of these categories. Nope, for the first time, we need to configure something on the "crud section" as a whole.

Go to one of your crud controllers and open its base class. We know that there are a number of methods that we can override to control things... and we've already done that for many of these. But we have not yet used configureCrud(). As its name suggests, this is all about controlling settings on the entire crud section.

And just like with most of the other methods, we can override this in our dashboard controller to make changes to all crud sections, or override it in one specific crud controller.

Sorting All Crud Sections

Let's see if we can set the default sorting across our entire admin to sort by id descending. To do that, open DashboardController and, anywhere inside, go to Code -> Generate - or command+N on a Mac - select override methods and choose configureCrud().

79 lines | src/Controller/Admin/DashboardController.php
// ... lines 1 - 21
class DashboardController extends AbstractDashboardController
{
// ... lines 24 - 58
public function configureCrud(): Crud
{
// ... lines 61 - 64
}
// ... lines 66 - 77
}

The Crud object has a bunch of methods on it... including one called setDefaultSort(). That sounds handy! Pass that the array of the fields we want to sort by. So, id set to DESC.

79 lines | src/Controller/Admin/DashboardController.php
// ... lines 1 - 58
public function configureCrud(): Crud
{
return parent::configureCrud()
->setDefaultSort([
'id' => 'DESC',
]);
}
// ... lines 66 - 79

Back over at the browser, when we click on "Questions"... beautiful! By default, it now sorts by id. Really, all sections now sort by id.

Sorting Differently in One Section

And what if we want to sort Questions in a different way than the default? I bet you already know how we would do that. So let's make things more interesting. Every Question is owned by a User. What if we wanted to show the questions whose users are enabled first? Can we do that?

First, since we want to only apply this to the questions section, we need to make this change inside of QuestionCrudController. Go to the bottom and... same thing: override configureCrud()... and call the exact same method as before: setDefaultSort(). Now we can say, askedBy - that's the property on Question that is a relation to User - askedBy.enabled. Set this to DESC.

And then, after sorting by enabled first, sort the rest by createdAt DESC.

67 lines | src/Controller/Admin/QuestionCrudController.php
// ... lines 1 - 14
class QuestionCrudController extends AbstractCrudController
{
// ... lines 17 - 21
public function configureCrud(Crud $crud): Crud
{
return parent::configureCrud($crud)
->setDefaultSort([
'askedBy.enabled' => 'DESC',
'createdAt' => 'DESC',
]);
}
// ... lines 30 - 65
}

Let's check it! Click "Questions". Because we're sorting across multiple fields, you don't see any header highlighted as the currently-sorted column. But... it looks right, at least based on the "Created At" dates.

To know for sure, click the database link on the web debug toolbar. Then... search this page for "ORDER BY". There it is! Click "View formatted query". And...yes! It's ordering by user.enabled and then createdAt. Pretty cool.

Disabling Sorting on a Field

So we now have default sorting... though the user can, of course, still click any header to sort by whichever column they want. But sometimes, sorting by a specific field doesn't make sense! You can see that it's already disabled for "answers".

And if we go over to... let's see... the Users section, there's also no sort for the avatar field, which also seems reasonable.

If you want to control this a bit further, you can. Like, let's pretend that we don't want people sorting by the name of the question. This is something we can configure on the field itself.

In QuestionCrudController, for the name field, call setSortable(false).

68 lines | src/Controller/Admin/QuestionCrudController.php
// ... lines 1 - 30
public function configureFields(string $pageName): iterable
{
// ... lines 33 - 41
yield Field::new('name')
->setSortable(false);
// ... lines 44 - 65
}
// ... lines 67 - 68

And... just like that, the arrow is gone.

Inlining Controls for an Admin Section

Before we move on - because there isn't a ton that we need to control on the CRUD-level, let me show you one more thing. Head to the Topics section. This entity is really simple... so we have plenty of space here to show these fields.

Normally, the "actions" on the index page are hidden under this dropdown. But, we can render them inline.

To do that, head to TopicCrudController... go down... and override configureCrud(). On the Crud object, call ->showEntityActionsInlined().

41 lines | src/Controller/Admin/TopicCrudController.php
// ... lines 1 - 10
class TopicCrudController extends AbstractCrudController
{
// ... lines 13 - 17
public function configureCrud(Crud $crud): Crud
{
return parent::configureCrud($crud)
->showEntityActionsInlined();
}
// ... lines 23 - 39
}

That's it. Now... yea! That looks better.

Next: I want to talk about using a what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor. There's actually a simple one built into Easy Admin. But we're going to go further and install our own. Doing that will require some custom JavaScript.