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23.

Configuration Loading and Type-Hinting

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Configuration Loading and Type-Hinting

So just like with routing files, services.yml isn’t magically loaded by Symfony: something needs to import it.

When the bundle was generated, an EventExtension class was created for you.

This class is mostly useful for third-party bundles, but one thing it does by default is load the services.yml file:

// src/Yoda/EventBundle/DependencyInjection/EventExtension.php
// ...

public function load(array $configs, ContainerBuilder $container)
{
    // ...
    // this was all generated when we generated the bundle
    $loader->load('services.yml');
}

If you don’t have this “Extension” class in your bundle, no problem! In fact, delete the entire DependencyInjection directory. Now, just import your services.yml file from inside config.yml:

# app/config/config.yml
imports:
    # ...
    - { resource: "@EventBundle/Resources/config/services.yml" }

You could also rename services.yml to anything else. As you can see, the name isn’t important.

Note

The point is that any file that defines a service must be imported manually. This can be done via the special “extension” class of a bundle or simply by adding it to the imports section of config.yml or any other configuration file.

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Type-Hinting

There’s one more thing in our service that’s bothering me. The first argument to the constructor is the entity manager object, but we’re not type-hinting it. Type-hinting is optional, but I like doing it because it gives me better errors and gives me auto-completion in PhpStorm.

So what is the class for the entity manager service? One way to find out is to use container:debug but pass it the service name:

php app/console container:debug doctrine.orm.entity_manager

It says that it’s just an “alias” for a different service. So let’s look up that one:

php app/console container:debug doctrine.orm.default_entity_manager

Great! Now we can add a type-hint for the argument. And by the way, a lot of times I just guess the class name and let PhpStorm mind trick ... I mean auto-complete the use statement for me. It’s lazy, but it almost always works:

// src/Yoda/EventBundle/Reporting/EventReportManager.php
// ...

use Doctrine\ORM\EntityManager;

class EventReportManager
{
    private $em;

    public function __construct(EntityManager $em)
    {
        $this->em = $em;
    }
}

If you’re not too comfortable with this, don’t worry. This is optional, but a good practice to get into.