Definition Unlocked

This Definition object is massively important to Symfony's container, and in the framework, they're built behind-the-scenes all over the place. I'll show you how in a bit.

Beyond using the class name and passing constructor arguments, there are a bunch of other things that you can train a Definition object to do. For example, what if you wanted the container to instantiate a service, but then also call a method on it before passing the service back?

Suppose that I want to log a message as soon as the logger is created - even before it's returned from the container. To do that, use addMethodCall(). The Logger class has a debug method on it - pass that as the first argument. This is equivalent to calling $logger->debug(). Then pass the array of arguments - we have just one, the message we want to log: "The logger just got started":

With this, the container will create the logger, call the debug() method on it, and then pass it back. Test it!

php dino_container/roar.php
tail dino_container/dino.log

Brilliant! Now let's get harder.

There are actually two ways to add handlers to Logger: via the constructor, like we're doing now, OR by calling a pushHandler() method. Let's see if we can create a second handler and hook it up with a method call.

Start by creating the new Definition - it'll be a stream again, so re-use the StreamHandler class. This handler will dump the output to the console. To do that, call setArguments() like before, but this time, we'll pass a single argument: php://stdout. Whoops, and I'll fix my wrong variable name. Now put it into the container with setDefinition() - we'll call it logger.std_out_logger.

Yea, the file is getting kind long and ugly. That'll be fixed soon.

To register this handler with the logger service, we could just add it to the second constructor argument. But to prove we've got this mastered, let's use $loggerDefinition->addMethodCall() and tell it to call a pushHandler method. This takes one argument: the actual handler object. To pass in the service we just setup, create a new Reference and give it the service name: logger.std_out_logger:

Open up the Logger class so we can see what's happening. Inside this class, there's a public pushHandler() method that has one argument:

// ...
// the Monolog\Logger class
class Logger implements LoggerInterface
{
    // ...
    
    public function pushHandler(HandlerInterface $handler)
    {
        // ...
    }
}

Our new definition code says: call pushHandler on the Logger object and pass it the service whose id is logger.std_out_logger. With any luck, log messages will dump into our file and get printed out to the screen.

Let's do it!

php dino_container/roar.php
tail dino_container/dino.log

Hey, there's one message! But inside dino.log, we see both. So why did only one message get printed to the screen? Actually, it's just a matter of order: we're calling the debug() method before pushing the second handler. If you want to fix things, just rearrange the two method calls. Now it prints both.

In the Symfony Framework, or Drupal or anything else that uses Symfony's container, every service starts as a humble Definition object. This object lets you tweak your future services in a bunch of other ways too, including things like adding tags, a thing called a configurator, creating objects through factories and a few other ways. To find out a lot more, head over to Symfony.com: there's a massive section in the Components area. You can basically earn you degree in DependencyInjection.

Now, in the Symfony framework, we work with Yaml files instead of Definition objects. So, how does all of this translate to Yaml?