Annotations

We've got a big project today, a site about movies. But only movies that have Samuel L. Jackson.

We'll start by creating a MovieController. We could right click on the Controller directory, go to new, and select file from the menu. But we can be faster! For mac users use ⌘+n to get the "new" menu open. And because we have the Symfony Plugin, by typing 'controller' you'll find an option to create one directly. Let's keep things simple and obvious and call it MovieController.

Ah, and when you use Git, PHPStorm asks you whether you want to add new files to git. I prefer to just do this myself so I'll click 'no'. Beautiful!

Auto-complete Annotations

We'll need a route to this MovieController, so add some annotations above indexAction(). Let's change these to @Route and let autocomplete do its thing. The one we want is Sensio\Bundle\FrameworkExtraBundle\Configuration\Route, select that option and hit tab and notice that it added a use statement on line 5:

That's really important because when you use annotations you need to have a use statement for them. Now instead of spending your time looking it up in the documentation, autocomplete will take care of it for you. Robots FTW!

Let's have our path be /movies/new and change indexAction() to newAction() because this controller will render a "new movie" form. And we'll fix up our render call in a second:

Head over to the browser and check if our new route is hitting our endpoint. Perfect! It can't find the template but that's fine because, there isn't one :)

Annotation Options

Annotations have a lot of options and one of them here is called name, which auto-completes for us. Hey thanks. Fill that in with movies_new:

If you're the curious sort and are wondering what other options you have, just hold the control key and hit the space bar: that will bring up all the options that you have in that spot. In fact, "control+space" can be used pretty much anywhere to show you your auto-complete option - really handy.

This autocomplete works for two reasons. First, an annotation represents a real class. Hold command, or control if you're in windows, and click @Route to open up the class that fuels it.

If you hold command again and go into its base class, you'll see that all of those options are represented as properties inside of that class:

To take this further if you go back to MovieController you can hold command and click on the name option and have it take you right to that property. You may not need this very often, but sometimes it's useful to see how an annotation option is used to figure out what value you want to set for it.

Now thanks to the annotations plugin, annotations act a lot more like normal code, with fancy auto-completion and other goodies.