Extending Symfony2: ParamConverter

Inside controllers you can easily end with lots of duplication using the same general finder logic again in several actions. Take this following example:

<?php
class UserController extends Controller
{
    public function showAction($id)
    {
        $dql = "SELECT u, d, a
                  FROM MyBundle\Entity\User u
                  JOIN u.details d
                  JOIN u.addresses a
                  WHERE u.id = ?1";

        $user = $this->get('doctrine.orm.default_entity_manager')
            ->createQuery($dql)
            ->setParameter(1, $id)
            ->getSingleResult();

        if ( ! $user) {
            throw new NotFoundHttpException();
        }

        return array('user' => $user);
    }
}

If we need this block of code in several actions of different controllers, we will end up with duplication that has to be eliminated.

One way of resolving the duplication appearing in this case, is moving the finder + not found logic into a common controller base class or into a trait. But this leaves us with a helper method buried in the code and a static dependency to a base class or a trait that we want to avoid.

<?php
class AbstractController extends Controller
{
    protected function findUser($id)
    {
        $dql = "SELECT u, d, a
                  FROM MyBundle\Entity\User u 
                  JOIN u.details d
                  JOIN u.addresses a
                  WHERE u.id = ?1";

        $user = $this->get('doctrine.orm.default_entity_manager')
            ->createQuery($dql)
            ->setParameter(1, $id)
            ->getSingleResult();

        if ( ! $user) {
            throw new NotFoundHttpException();
        }

        return $user;
    }
}

There are two problems with this sort of refactoring:

1. We are using inheritance for code-reuse.
2. We hide the findUser behavior in an abstract class and make it hard to test.

The SensioFrameworkExtraBundle offers an extension hook called Parameter Converters to transform Request attributes to objects directly for controller method arguments. They hook into the kernel.controller event that you can use yourself to achieve the same goal.

Lets see how the action will look like after our refactoring:

<?php
class UserController extends Controller
{
    public function showAction(User $user)
    {
        return array('user' => $user);
    }
}

Very concise and easy to read. The param converter doing the heavy lifting looks like this:

<?php
namespace MyProject\Request\ParamConverter;

use Sensio\Bundle\FrameworkExtraBundle\Configuration\ConfigurationInterface;
use Sensio\Bundle\FrameworkExtraBundle\Request\ParamConverter\ParamConverterInterface;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request;
use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\Exception\NotFoundHttpException;
use Doctrine\ORM\EntityManager;

class UserParamConverter implements ParamConverterInterface
{
    private $entityManager;

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

    public function apply(Request $request, ConfigurationInterface $configuration)
    {
        $id = $request->attributes->get('id');

        $dql = "SELECT u, d, a
                  FROM MyBundle\Entity\User u
                  JOIN u.details d
                  JOIN u.addresses a
                  WHERE u.id = ?1";

        $user = $this->get('doctrine.orm.default_entity_manager')
            ->createQuery($dql)
            ->setParameter(1, $id)
            ->getSingleResult();

        if ( ! $user) {
            throw new NotFoundHttpException();
        }

        $param = $configuration->getName();
        $request->attributes($param, $user);

        return true;
    }

    public function supports(ConfigurationInterface $configuration)
    {
        return "MyProject\Entity\User" === $configuration->getClass();
    }
}

Now we only need to register this class in the dependency injection container:

<service id="my_project.user_param_converter"
      class="MyProject\Request\ParamConverter\UserParamConverter">
    <argument type="service" id="doctrine.orm.default_entity_manager" />

    <tag name="request.param_converter" converter="user" priority="10" />
</service>

With the priority configuration the User entity is now always handled by our custom param converter and not by the default Doctrine converter.

In a next step, we should extract the query logic from the ParamConverter into a custom Doctrine entity repository. But that is a task for another blog post in this series.