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> Symfony 3 > Symfony 3 Forms: Build, Render & Conquer!
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03.

Process that Form!

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Inspect the HTML and check out the <form> element. Notice: this does not have an action attribute. This means that the form will submit right back to the same route and controller that renders it. You can totally change this, but we won't.

In other words, our single action method will be responsible for rendering the form and processing it when the request method is POST.

Before we do any processing, we need the request. Type-hint it as an argument:

46 lines | src/AppBundle/Controller/Admin/GenusAdminController.php
// ... lines 1 - 7
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request;
// ... lines 9 - 12
class GenusAdminController extends Controller
{
// ... lines 15 - 31
public function newAction(Request $request)
{
// ... lines 34 - 44
}
}

$form->handleRequest()

Next, to actually handle the submit, call $form->handleRequest() and pass it the $request object:

46 lines | src/AppBundle/Controller/Admin/GenusAdminController.php
// ... lines 1 - 12
class GenusAdminController extends Controller
{
// ... lines 15 - 31
public function newAction(Request $request)
{
$form = $this->createForm(GenusFormType::class);
// only handles data on POST
$form->handleRequest($request);
// ... lines 38 - 44
}
}

This is really cool: the $form knows what fields it has on it. So $form->handleRequest() goes out and grabs the post data off of the $request object for those specific fields and processes them.

The confusing thing is that this only does this for POST requests. If this is a GET request - like the user simply navigated to the form - the handleRequest() method does nothing and our form renders just like it did before.

Tip

You can configure the form to submit on GET requests if you want. This is useful for search forms

But if the form was just submitted, then we'll want to do something with that information, like save a new Genus to the database. Add an if statement: if ($form->isSubmitted() && $form->isValid()):

46 lines | src/AppBundle/Controller/Admin/GenusAdminController.php
// ... lines 1 - 12
class GenusAdminController extends Controller
{
// ... lines 15 - 31
public function newAction(Request $request)
{
$form = $this->createForm(GenusFormType::class);
// only handles data on POST
$form->handleRequest($request);
if ($form->isSubmitted() && $form->isValid()) {
// ... line 39
}
// ... lines 41 - 44
}
}

In other words, if this is a POST request and if the form passed all validation. We'll add validation soon.

Fetching $form->getData()

If we get inside this if statement, life is good. For now, just dump the submitted data: dump($form->getData()) and then die;:

46 lines | src/AppBundle/Controller/Admin/GenusAdminController.php
// ... lines 1 - 12
class GenusAdminController extends Controller
{
// ... lines 15 - 31
public function newAction(Request $request)
{
$form = $this->createForm(GenusFormType::class);
// only handles data on POST
$form->handleRequest($request);
if ($form->isSubmitted() && $form->isValid()) {
dump($form->getData());die;
}
// ... lines 41 - 44
}
}

OK, let's see what this dumps out!

Fill out the form with very realistic data and submit. Check that out! It dumps and associative array with the three fields we added to the form. That's so simple! We added 3 fields to the form, rendered them in a template, and got those three values as an associative array.

Now, it would be very, very easy to use that associative array to create a new Genus object, populate it with the data, and save it via Doctrine.

But, it would be awesomesauce if the form framework could do our job for us. I mean, use the data to automatically create the Genus object, populate it, and return that to us. Let's do that.