Field Types and Options

Hi there,

First, I'm a Symfony beginner, but with KnpUniversity I had learned a lot so far! :-)
I want to make a form with a checkbox and when the user check this checkbox, there should display another field, which was hidden by default. Short: display a field depending on a checkbox ;-)
I found a solution with jQuery. Is there a way to this only with Symfony?

Best regards
Michael

Hi there!

Let me tell you that I'm really having fun with your courses, laughing all the time. You have a gift Ryan. I'm feeling more dangerous day by day :)

Well, I know you have the easy solution to this. I have a User Entity which has a Team Entity (manyToOne relationship). The logged user can add another one just to his/her team. I was wondering if I could set a hidden field to automatically select the team where the logged user belongs to. The second option is to have a visible Choice Type, but with just one Team by default.

I've already tried with dependency injection (ha-ha-ha) using TokenStorageInterface in the constructor of the FormType class, and a HiddenType field:

public function buildForm(FormBuilderInterface $builder, array $options)
{
    $user = $this->tokenStorage->getToken()->getUser();

    $builder
        ->add('email')
         ->add('name')
        ->add('lastName')
        ->add('team', HiddenType::class, [
            'data' => $user->getTeam()
        ])
    ;
}

But it gets the name of the team only, not the entity object. I read about DataTransformers, and another not so clean solutions.

What do you recommend me to do?

Thanks in advance and congratulations for your great work.

Hello, I'm trying to use ChoiceType to create 'choices' but the choices are strings, not a boolean:

I'm not sure what the Option should be for each string, when set up with true, I get a 1 in the database as expected.

Any suggestion for the Option to get the strings in the 'choices' list populated?

            ->add('printProcess', ChoiceType::class, array(
                'choices' => array(
                    'Flexography' => true, 
                    'Offset Lithography' => true,
                    'Rotogravure' => true,
                )
            ))

Well this seems to work, key and value the same:

            ->add('printProcess', ChoiceType::class, array(
                'choices' => array(
                    'Flexography' => 'Flexograpy',
                    'Offset Lithography' => 'Offset Lithography',
                    'Rotogravure' => 'Rotogravure',
                )
            ))

Hey @thisismattness!

Yes! In fact, that's exactly how the EntityType field *should* work out-of-the-box... but a lot depends on your setup :). Basically, when you have an EntityType with multiple=true, when you submit, Symfony process the incoming, checked ids, turn those into your entity objects, and then set that array of entities onto the property on your main entity (whatever field name you're using in your form for the EntityType). And also, when the form *renders*, it does the opposite: it uses your query to get all of the entity objects for the choices, then gets the array of entity objects from that same property and compares them. For example, suppose I have a Category entity with a products property. I then add a products field to my form, which is an EntityType. When the form renders, it uses my custom query on that field to load all (for example) 25 products in my system. It then looks at the products property on Category, which holds (for example) 10 of those products. So now, it knows to render 25 checkboxes, with 10 of them checked.

That's a long way of saying that something might not be setup correctly if you're not getting your boxes auto-checked. Let me know if this explanation helped! And feel free to come back with some of your code - it'll help show what's going on :).

Cheers!

Hey Matt!

Ah, it *does* help :). So, what you're doing makes great sense, but is a little non-traditional. The EntityType is meant to be attached to a property whose value is an *object*... basically a ManyToOne property. But, your name field is a string. Based on what I'm seeing, if you submit right now and dump your final value, the name property will be an array of Chapter objects (not a string). (I'm also a little confused about how you have a "name" field, but the user is selecting multiple checkboxes - so I could be misunderstanding something!)

But, you totally *can* do this, you just need to do a little bit more work :). Basically, you should use the ChoiceType field with a custom data transformer that's able to convert to and from the "text" of the name field and the Chapter entity object (or objects, if you really do intend for this to be multiple checkboxes). You'll approximately be following this tutorial: http://symfony.com/doc/curr...

Let me know if this helps... or confuses further :).

Cheers!

Hi,

I want to know how to handle FileType with an entity. I've got products and productImages. But I can't seem to find out why I cannot save this to the database. It does upload the file, but I get an error with saving.

http://stackoverflow.com/qu...

here's the stackoverflow question I asked for it.

Hello, Ryan! Thanx a lot for your voice in my head )) I don't understand if I has some ORM field that could be empty, am I have to make it "nullable"? I tried to pass an empty string as default value (private $some = '') but always get an error that a column cannot be null... I feel that nullable (if it's work) is not a good practice, please give an advice

Hey Matt!

Coding for a few weeks now! Wow! Congrats! And don't sweat too much about this form stuff - forms is the hardest part of Symfony (it's also powerful and rewarding... but can easily be frustrating, even for really seasoned devs!).

Ok, I think I definitely understand your setup - the jsfiddle was great. Afterall, backend code ultimately exists just to power some UI :). Here's why I think this is confusing you: the purpose of your form is not to update an entity. What I mean is, most of the time, we create a form so that we can update or create some entity. For example, if you wanted to create a form to allow the user to create a Chapter, that would be pretty easy for you: your form would be bound to the Chapter class, you would have a field for each property in your entity, and the types of those fields would naturally be simple.

But in your case, your form isn't doing that: the purpose of you form is simply to create a checkbox of chapters. And when you submit, you just want to fetch what chapters were checked, so you can redirect the user. So, here's the key: I want you to create a form that is not bound to an object. If you build it in your controller, it should look something like this:

// the form is not bound to an object. Instead, we just pass it an associative array of
// "starting" data, that should be used to pre-fill the form
$defaultData = [
    // I don't know if this is right - the point is, you should set a "chapters" key to the
    // array of Chapter objects that should be pre-filled
    'chapters' => $quotes->getChapters()
];
$myForm = $this->createFormBuilder($defaultData)
    ->add('chapters', EntityType::class, [
        // this should be the entity class that should be used for the checkboxes
        // I'm assuming you want a checkbox for each Chapter
        // notice there is no logic here to say which chapters should be pre-checked, that happens above
        'class' => 'AppBundle\Entity\Chapter',
        // I'm assuming the Chapter has a name property - just kinda made that up :)
        'choice_label' => 'name',
        'multiple' => true,
        'expanded' => true
    ]
)
->getForm();

$form->handleRequest($request);
if ($form->isValid()) {
    $formData = $myForm->getData();
    // this will be an array of Chapter objects, the ones the user selected
    /** @var Chapter[] $chapters */
    $chapters = $formData['chapters'];

    // loop over $chapters to create your ?chapter=chapter_foo&chapter_bar query string, and then redirect to a route with this appended to it
    $queryString = '...';
    $url = $this->generateUrl('result_route_name').'?'.$queryString;

    return $this->redirect($url);
}

Let me know if this setup makes sense, and if I've finally hit on the problem! Focus on this idea: the EntityType's job is simply to create a bunch of checkboxes (in this case) for all the records for some entity (e.g. Chapter). You can of course use the query_builder option to filter that list from all Chapters to some Chapters. But, the options you pass to EntityType have nothing to do with which checkboxes should be checked by default: that's entirely up to what data you pass into your form. And in this case, we're not binding our form to any entity, we're just passing it an associative array, and it's giving us an associative array after (i.e. $form->getData() is an associative array). We're not binding it to an entity because it's not really necessary: it's a really cool "nice-to-have" when you eventually want to update an entity and persist it. But in this case, all we need is that our form gives us an array of the Chapter objects that were checked. Then, we're happy :).

Cheers!

How to control input in the fields ? In other words, what if I want to make sure the user doesn't click "add" with a field being filled with only spaces for example ? Or with words > 10 characters, or any other checking I want to add. How to do that? Will it be explained later on? ^_^

Hello,
I have a problem with the isPublished field. The HTML for options is generated as follows:

<option value="1">Yes</option>
<option value="" selected="selected">No</option>

so, "false" is parsed as an empty string and the option is marked as default. On form submit, with "No" selected, the browser (Firefox 47.0) shows the balloon "Please select an item in the list". When "Yes" is selected there's no balloon.

When I change the field settings and map "Yes" to "1" and "No" to "0", it works:

<option value="1">Yes</option>
<option value="0">No</option>

Why is that?

Hey Matt!

You got it! It's important that your form field name "chapters" matches a key on your incoming/starting data. Usually, we bind a form to an object, so we would expect to have a "chapters" property on our object, which it would use to know which boxes to check. But in this case, since we're binding the form to an array, it's simply an array key. You got the "aha!" moment I was hoping you'd get :).

Cheers!

Hi,

Regarding the placeholder, in formType.

// method 1: This works.
->add('name', TextType::class, array(
'attr' => array('placeholder' => 'Please type in your name here.')
))

//Method 2: As suggested in the video, but, this did not work for me...
->add('category', null,
['placeholder' => 'Type in its category.']
)

And I get the below error when using Method 2 to create a placeholder for input field...
Is there anything I forgot to make it work?

The option "placeholder" does not exist. Defined options are: "action", "allow_extra_fields", "attr", "auto_initialize", "block_name", "by_reference", "compound", "constraints", "csrf_field_name", "csrf_message", "csrf_protection", "csrf_token_id", "csrf_token_manager", "data", "data_class", "disabled", "empty_data", "error_bubbling", "error_mapping", "extra_fields_message", "inherit_data", "invalid_message", "invalid_message_parameters", "label", "label_attr", "label_format", "mapped", "method", "post_max_size_message", "property_path", "required", "translation_domain", "trim", "upload_max_size_message", "validation_groups".
500 Internal Server Error - UndefinedOptionsException