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New Autowiring Attributes

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So what's new in Symfony 7? Nothing! The real question is, what's new in Symfony 6.4? Or maybe, what's new in 6.3 or 6.2 that... maybe we missed?

Quick Tour of New Features

The best place to find this stuff... is the Symfony blog. Javier does a fantastic job with every release, uncovering the most important features.

I've pulled up a few of my favorites, like the workflow profiler. If you use the workflow component, you can now see a crazy-cool visualization of your workflow inside the profiler.

There are also some changes to the logout system - just to make life simpler... some new constraints, like PasswordStrengthConstraint and another that prevents suspicious characters, like zero width space characters. This can be used to prevent someone from creating a username that looks like someone else's.

If you're building an API, there's an excellent debug:serializer command to see all the metadata for a class.

And finally, the new Webhook and RemoteEvent components, which deserve their own tutorial. So we'll save that for another time.

These are just a few of my favorite features, but you can look at everything by going to the "Living on the Edge" section of the blog and filtering by the version. A great way to nerd out.

The Autowire Attribute

But I do want to walk through a few new features together, starting with improvements to the autowiring system. These happened over the last several versions of Symfony and... they do a lot of things. The overall effect is that you'll probably never need to go into services.yaml again.

Let's dive in! In an old tutorial, I added this bind for an $isDebug argument.

32 lines | config/services.yaml
// ... lines 1 - 12
services:
// ... line 14
_defaults:
// ... lines 16 - 17
bind:
'bool $isDebug': '%kernel.debug%'
// ... lines 20 - 32

The reason I did that lives in src/Controller/VinylController.php: I gave this controller an $isDebug argument... which isn't autowirable.

58 lines | src/Controller/VinylController.php
// ... lines 1 - 13
class VinylController extends AbstractController
{
public function __construct(
private bool $isDebug
)
{}
// ... lines 20 - 56
}

In services.yaml, remove the bind.

When we refresh, error! It says:

Hey you silly person: you have an $isDebug argument on a service, but I have no idea what to pass to that.

Hence, why we had the bind. Starting a few Symfony versions ago, we now have an Autowire attribute. If you have an argument that can't be autowired, this is your friend. Add it before the arg and define what you want. This can be a service, an expression, an environment variable, a parameter, a kitten, whatever. We want a param: kernel.debug.

60 lines | src/Controller/VinylController.php
// ... lines 1 - 8
use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\Attribute\Autowire;
// ... lines 10 - 14
class VinylController extends AbstractController
{
public function __construct(
#[Autowire('%kernel.debug%')]
private bool $isDebug
)
{}
// ... lines 22 - 58
}

Inside, dump($this->isDebug) to make sure it's working.

And... it is! Autowire is my new favorite attribute. But if you hold command or control to open this class... then double-click on the Attribute directory, we see a whole list of cool, dependency-injection related attributes. Exclude is a way to exclude a class from being auto-registered as a service. Autoconfigure and AutoconfigureTag are both ways to configure options on your service. Put this above your class - or even above an interface - and the options will apply to the service or services that implement that interface.

There's also AutowireIterator and AutowireLocator. If you have a set of services that implement a tag, you can use AutowireIterator to get those services passed to you as an iterator, or AutowireLocator to get them passed to you as a locator, basically an associative array of services.

Trying AutowireIterator

For example, pretend that, in VinylController, we want to get an iterable of every console command in our app. Say private iterable $commands. And to prove this is working, foreach over $this->commands as $command... then dump the object.

67 lines | src/Controller/VinylController.php
// ... lines 1 - 15
class VinylController extends AbstractController
{
public function __construct(
// ... lines 19 - 21
private iterable $commands,
)
{
foreach ($this->commands as $command) {
dump($command);
}
}
// ... lines 29 - 65
}

If we stopped now, we'd get the classic error that says:

I have no idea what to pass for this $commands argument!

We want an iterable of every services that implement a specific tag. Grab those with #[AutowireIterator], then the tag we want: console.command.

67 lines | src/Controller/VinylController.php
// ... lines 1 - 9
use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\Attribute\AutowireIterator;
// ... lines 11 - 15
class VinylController extends AbstractController
{
public function __construct(
// ... lines 19 - 20
#[AutowireIterator('console.command')]
private iterable $commands,
)
{
foreach ($this->commands as $command) {
dump($command);
}
}
// ... lines 29 - 65
}

And just like that, we got them! We see all 102 console commands in my app. I know, it's a silly example, but isn't that cool?

Back in the controller, undo that.

60 lines | src/Controller/VinylController.php
// ... lines 1 - 14
class VinylController extends AbstractController
{
public function __construct(
#[Autowire('%kernel.debug%')]
private bool $isDebug,
)
{}
// ... lines 22 - 58
}

Next up: let's talk about a few subtle, but powerful new ways to fetch request data like query parameters and the request payload.