Passing Arguments From Controller To Form Type In Symfony 3

This week I have been updating my Pray For News app that I built for my church, and other churches and groups to use. The app is built in Symfony2 and currently is in version 2.7. I am updating the framework to Symfony 3.1 and removing all the deprecations. Most deprecation notices are easy to eliminate and deal with forms.

If you are updating your app and you find a deprecation notice that says:
Passing type instances to FormBuilder::add(), Form::add() or the FormFactory is deprecated since version 2.8 and will not be supported in 3.0. Use the fully-qualified type class name instead.

Likely you are instantiating a new instance of your form like new YourFormType(). This was fine up until version 2.8 and is no longer the way to get an instance of your form. Unless you make your form into a service, which many times I think is a good idea because you can easily inject dependencies.

The deprecated way of instantiating a form

In my case, I was passing dependency arguments to the form’s __construct method from my controller. Below is an example of the old way to do things.

The controller:

$form = $this->createForm(new TeamType($currentOrg), $entity, array(
    'action' => $this->generateUrl('teams_update', array('id' => $entity->getId())),
    'method' => 'PUT',
));

The form type:

class TeamType extends AbstractType
{
    private $organization;

    public function __construct(Organization $currentOrg)
    {
        $this->organization = $currentOrg;
    }
    ...
}

The updated way of instantiating a form

The new and correct way of getting an instance of your form since Symfony 2.8 is to pass the fully qualified name of the form’s class. For example, pass FormType::class or Namespace\YourAppBundle\Form\YourFormType to the createForm method.

You can see the problem if you wanted to inject dependencies to the construct. In my case, I needed to send the user’s current organization entity that they are logged in under.

$form = $this->createForm(TeamType::class, $entity, array(
    'action'     => $this->generateUrl('teams_update', array('id' => $entity->getId())),
    'method'     => 'PUT',
    'currentOrg' => $currentOrg->getId(),
));

So what to do when you can no longer pass dependencies to the construct? You can pass them in the array options to the buildForm method! Do this in the third argument of the createForm method in the controller, like the example above.

Then in your form type, you can grab the arguments, like below.

/**
 * @param FormBuilderInterface $builder
 * @param array $options
 */
public function buildForm(FormBuilderInterface $builder, array $options)
{
    $this->currentOrg = $options['currentOrg'];
    ...
}

You also must declare your options in the setDefaults method of the configureOptions function. Be sure that you are using the new OptionsResolver class and not the old OptionsResolverInterface class. For good measure I am also setting the setRequired method and the setTypes() method as well.

/**
 * @param OptionsResolver $resolver
 */
public function configureOptions(OptionsResolver $resolver)
{
    $resolver->setDefaults([
            'data_class' => 'Namespace\AppBundle\Entity\Team',
            'currentOrg' => 1,
    ]);

    $resolver->setRequired('currentOrg'); // Requires that currentOrg be set by the caller.
    $resolver->setAllowedTypes('currentOrg', 'integer'); // Validates the type(s) of option(s) passed.
}

Easy enough, right? A special thanks to this StackOverflow question for reference. Leave your comments and any additional knowledge or tricks you have for Symfony 3 forms below!