Handling the Form Submit

Hey @Himanshu ,

Please, rewatch this video, we're explaining how to do this in it. Or look closer at the code blocks in this chapter, starting from https://symfonycasts.com/screencast/symfony-forms/form-submit#codeblock-b99603219a

I hope that helps!

Cheers!

Hey Michael,

Why is the value not allowed? Can you show me the full error message please? Also, you may solve this by using data transformers. You can read more about them here https://symfony.com/doc/current/form/data_transformers.html

Cheers!

Dear MolloKhan

Thanks a lot for the fast reply!
I could solve the problem: in the SubmitEvent I do remove the task field again and set it back to the ChoiceType. Sometimes it's so easy;-)

Thanks a lot for your support and merry Christmas!
Michael

Hey Shane,

I'm not sure I completely understand your question. What do you want to achieve exactly? As I understand you already have all necessary relations. Do you want to create a Symfony form for this structure? If so - you need nested form probably. Or do you want to know how to store the data in your DB properly?

Cheers!

Hey Victor, thanks for getting back to me :)

So I will try my best to articulate my question!

I want to create a symfony form for this structure, please see example below:

In my database lives 10 questions. I want my form to display those ten questions!
I also want my form to display the possible answers for each of the questions (the bi-directional relations are already established)

Hey Shane,

Ah, ok... I think I got it, thanks! I'll try to give you some tips ) Yeah, in this case you will definitely need a nested form type, I'd recommend you to call the main form type as QuizFormType, inside you will need to add a single field called "questions" which will be a CollectionType of other type, in your case it will be QuestionType. The QuestionType custom form type in turn will have another field called "answers" that will be a CollectionType of AnswerType custom form type. In the last, i.e. AnswerType, I suppose you want to have a text field where users will write their answers.

So, as you can see it's a custom form type that is nested in another custom form type and so on. I'd recommend you to start QuizFormType and add one nested level at a time, render the form and see the result... if it works - then move next with another nested level, and so on. Do not try to create this complex form at once from scratch, you may get lost in it.

I hope this helps! Sorry I can't help with more details - unfortunately, we can answer only tutorial-related question, we don't have bandwidth to answer personal project questions but I hope my tips will help you a lot to start working on it.

Cheers!

Hey @Farry7!

Yes! Your edited way is totally fine. But... I think you don't even need that line :). The explanation is here: https://symfonycasts.com/sc...

Basically, you can use the form in 2 different ways:

1) (as is shown in this chapter): you create a form that is NOT bound to an object. Then, after you submit, $form->getData() is an associative array. In this situation, your original could would work just fine.'

2) But most of the time (as shown in the https://symfonycasts.com/sc... chapter) you will "bind" your form to an object. What that means is that when you submit, Symfony automatically takes the submitted data and puts it onto your object. Then, there is no need to say $article->setTitle(...) because the form system already did that for you.

Let me know if that helps!

Cheers!

I am creating a complex form with around 30 input fields. When binding them to a class, it starts guessing that input name Article should be a textarea, etc. I am not sure if I want the system to guess the fields for me. Is it possible to remove $form->getData() and not let the system guess the input types?

Hey @Farry7!

You're right - it starts to guess the field type based on the Doctrine "type" that the property has. But, you can absolutely override this in your form. Basically, I let the form system "guess", and when it guesses wrong/I need something else, I override it in the form. We talk about that here: https://symfonycasts.com/sc...

Cheers!

Hey @Farry&

A lot of good questions here. Let me see if I can help :).

How do I add classes to individual input fields?

This can be done by passing the attr variable to form_row or form_widget - like we do here - https://symfonycasts.com/screencast/symfony-forms/dynamic-select-js#codeblock-ab47270a79 - it's not the most "attractive" thing, but that's how you do it

And how do I add some divs in between certain input fields?

It depends on the exact markup you're looking for, but I usually use form_row (which renders a div that's around the input, label and error message). And so, it would be:

{{ form_row(form.firstName) }}
<hr/>
{{ form_row(form.lastName) }}

That doesn't give you full control, as each field still renders inside a div with the input+label+error message in a certain spot, but it gives you some control. You can also go further and use the other form-rendering functions instead of form_row. Below is an example - not really a useful example - but an example of rendering the error, label and widget wherever/however you want.

{{ form_error(form.firstName) }}
<div>
    {{ form_label(form.firstName) }}
    {{ form_widget(form.firstName) }}
</div>
<hr/>
{{ form_error(form.lastName) }}
<div>
{{ form_label(form.lastName) }}
{{ form_widget(form.lastName) }}
</div>

If I completely skip Symfony Forms and use Doctrine and custom html form markup. Will it be more work with validating, etc? Because I have made plenty of forms outside of Symfony and handled the validation etc by myself. But I don't know what the extra value is to use Symfony Forms instead of a custom one.

You can definitely do that. The biggest things you would lose (and have to do by hand) would be:

A) Rendering the fields - you'll need to do that by hand, including checking to see if each field has an error (probably you would pass an array of validation errors from the controller to the template, then on each field, check to see if that field has an error). Plus, often you also want to add an "field-error" (or something) class to elements with an error. This is all the type of stuff the form component handles for you.

B) Pre-filling the fields: if you're updating an item, you'll need to pass the item into the template and make sure to set the value="" for all the fields to the existing value (or the "selected" on the right option element).

C) Setting the data back onto your object. When you submit, the form component automatically takes the data and sets it back onto your entity object. You'll have a lot of $product->setName($data['name'); type of manual code.

The form system is complex... but every time I think about not using it, I remember how much it gives me.

Btw, in Symfony 5.2, there is another way to render the fields for a form: completely manually - https://symfony.com/blog/new-in-symfony-5-2-form-field-helpers - that allows you to use the form system... but with even more control over rendering.

Cheers!

Hey denizgelion

Thanks for your kind words :)

About $this in PHP. $this is a reserved keyword that refers to the current object. It's defined inside of any of its declared non-static methods. So, by using $this you have access to everything that's contained by such class (that's not static). When working with inheritance, the only thing you won't have access to is to private things (methods, attributes, constants) that live inside the parent class. Did this help you?

Cheers!

Ah, that clears the last missunderstanding. Thanks for the quick reply. I asked a few other fellow programmers and ultimately this example made me understand it: https://www.w3schools.com/j...
It might be a Javascript example, but I just needed a very simple example of what it does. As stupid as it sounds ;)

Can you briefly explain what an object / methodes are?

Hey @Farry7!

That is, unfortunately, not such an easy thing to briefly explain... or any brief explanation probably wouldn't be too helpful :). Object are instances of classes and methods are functions you can all on that object. For example, you might have a class called Dog, then you create two dog objects - $brownDog = new Dog(); $blackDog = new Dog();. Then, you can call methods on each dog - like making one wag its tail and making another bark - $brownDog->wagTail(); $blackDog->bark();

That's the brief (and probably not too-helpful) description. For a proper explanation, we have a track with various courses, which I know is a bigger commitment, but it's the best way to explain :) https://symfonycasts.com/tracks/oo

Cheers!

Hey horlyk

Yeah it's a pretty weird situation, and it totally depends on your browser, some of them shows confirm eg. resend POST request or not, but some just resend previous request completely. You can refresh page without resending POST with clicking on address bar and hitting enter key. Or use redirects after successful form submission.

Cheers!

...and it totally depends on your browser

It was the point that I wanted to know, thanks)

Cheers!

Hey Mike P.

I like to only add validations to fields that get populated via a form (or from the body of a POST request), so in this case, since your code is in charge of setting the user on the comment, I would disable the validation for that field and I would create a "manager" service that would be in charge of creating new comments

Cheers!

Hey Duilio,

Nice job! I really like it ;) Anyway, a good way to practice with Twig extensions! And nice discovering that "is_safe" option, though be careful about it - it's OK while you understand how it works and that users does not have access to pass those "$icon" argument. Otherwise it might be an XSS injection from malicious users. But as far as users can't affect on the argument value it should be good, i.e. when you explicitly passing arguments like in your example: "{{ icon(article.published ? 'check' : 'times') }}" but NOT sometimes like "{{ icon(user.customField) }}" where customField might be any string that user may set. Otherwise, you need a really good validation and escaping

Cheers!

Thank you, victor. Could you please help me out with the following 2 questions:

- What do you recommend/use to insert data in the database when writing Functional Tests or tests that interact with the database (i.e. unit testing a repository)?

- Do you recommend going to Behat/Mink or using the built in test capabilities in Symfony or it really depends on the project?

Hey Duilio,

> What do you recommend/use to insert data in the database when writing Functional Tests or tests that interact with the database (i.e. unit testing a repository)?

If you interact with DB layer - it's not a unit test anymore, it's integration test. Most of the time I use entity manager to fill the DB with some data for testing. Like create a few entities, persist() them and then do flush(). After this I test my queries and check if they return the correct data. of course, not all the queries, just important ones are tested this way. As an alternative, you can look at https://github.com/liip/Lii... to fill in the DB with some data, depends on your case, but most of the time doing it manually is enough.

> Do you recommend going to Behat/Mink or using the built in test capabilities in Symfony or it really depends on the project?

Hm, it's probably more matter of taste. We love Behat and we use it a lot to tests things in SymfonyCasts. It allows to test even javascript features using Selenium server. And we even have a tutorial about it: https://symfonycasts.com/sc... - so, it is a great tool for testing. But mostly we do functional/integration testing with it. For unit testing, we, of course, using PHPUnit - it's kinda standard. But no matter what tools you use in your project, you just need to be confident in your features and know that those features work because tests are green.

Also, I've not used it a lot yet, but Symfony has a new great tool for testing called Panther: https://github.com/symfony/... - it's new, but you can give it a try because it's cool.

Cheers!

Yo Neal O.!

Ha! Wow. No, that IS weird. You did a good job debugging to dump() the articles in the controller. So... doing a <code{{ dump(articles) }}` in Twig DOES correctly show all articles? But then, when you loop, suddenly one is missing?

Let me know. Cheers!

Thanks for the reply Ryan. Found out that the last article was hiding behind the made by knp footer so it was listing just hiding.

Phew! That's the best possible news :). Thanks for the update.

Hey ian

I wouldn't move the logic for handling the request into a service, that's a Controller job. But you can move the rest of the logic into a service. It's easy, you just have to create a new class, add a new method with all the desired logic, and use DI (dependency injection) for injecting all the dependencies that your service needs

Cheers!

Hey Laura M.

How are you planning to manage those submits? As a traditional website, or you will have like an API where you can submit POST/PUT requests?

Cheers!

At first it was a POST request though a form and actually I found a way to do it. Now I am wondering how you can submit through AJAX that form, process it in the controller and return an appropriate response, is it the same as a normal submit form?

If you don't want to change your backend code, what you can do is to add some JS code that finds the form element, and then triggers the submit action

$('#some-button').on('click', function() {
    const myForm = $('#some-form');
    myForm.trigger('submit');
});

Hey Mike,

Haha, good catch :) Well, CSRF token should not be unique for each page load, it should be unique for forms and for user session. I think that's how CSRF protection works in Symfony, though I don't know internal details 100%, just saying at the first sight. The idea of CSRF is not protect from double submit, but protect from malicious user sending a request on behalf of user. For this, it's enough to generate a token that is known to server and user only, even if it's not unique per page load.

I hope it helps.

Cheers!

Hey Tonislav A.!

No worries about the indentation - Disqus has a way to do code blocks - but it's honestly kind of annoying ;).

Ok, I think I know your problem. I noticed that you did ->setData(['status' => 'new']) on your form when rendering it. That is totally legal and fine. However, when you do this, all you're doing is setting the data onto the Form object during that request. Typically the data would then be used by the form to pre-fill some of your fields (e.g. you set 'firstName' => 'Ryan' and then the first name input by has "Ryan" in it). But, in your case, it sounds like you're not rendering any fields - just a submit button. So, when your form submits... it really is submitting absolutely no data.

If you want to send some sort of "flag" to the controller that's handling the submit, I'd recommend either (A) putting it in the URL - e.g. /my/custom/controller/{status} or (B) possibly as a `HiddenType</code field.

Let me know if this helps!

Cheers!

Hey Ad F.!

Ah! I think the problem isn't the paginator, but Doctrine (well really SensioFrameworkExtraBundle) is unable to figure out how to query for your "Advert" entity. My guess is that you have a route that includes a {advert} wildcard, right? When SensioFrameworkExtraBundle sees the Advert $advert type-hint, it tries to query for this Advert object. Unless you have extra configuration, it tries to see if there is a property on your entity called "advert". If there is not, then it can't figure out how to query for your entity object. This is why I often us {id} in my route - because the property is called "id", this "param converter" feature from SensioFrameworkExtraBundle knows how to query.

But also... this page looks like it is listing many adverts. Did you intend/want to query for a single Advert? I see you'r using it to transform some markdown... but then you don't use that $mk variable. Let me know!

Cheers!