Autowired Traits in Symfony

  • Sat, Oct 7, 2017
  • 4-minute read
This post is quite old, and may not be up-to-date or maintained. Please take the information here with a grain of salt.

This is something that I think is pretty slick in Symfony. With 3.3, Symfony introduced the idea of autowired services. Basically, you just put a type hint for what you need and the container injects the correct service as if by magic. You can take advantage of this in some more unusual places that aren’t immediately apparent after reading the documentation.

In my case, I had a controller trait that provides some common functions but it needs to interface with some services to do this. The first way I thought to do things was to use the method injection on all the controller actions, but this gets really messy really quick. In this case, all of our controller actions would have to have all of the services this traits needs, which introduces quite a bit of repetition and makes the trait and controllers more coupled.

Since your controllers are really services now (see below), you can take advantage of injection via setters (mentioned here). Even in your traits, the container follows the annotations, so you can have them autowired too. All you have to do is create a setter function and add the @required annotation. This way, your controller class is ignorant of the inner workings of your trait, making things a lot more clear.

Here’s an example, I have a trait that acts as a shortcut converting data coming from the request into an object from our database. Our trait looks like this:

<?php
namespace CoreBundle\Traits;

use StorehouseBundle\Entity\Project;
use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\Exception\NotFoundHttpException;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request;
use Doctrine\ORM\EntityManagerInterface;

/*
 * The Storehouse - Project Storage for Big Ideas
 *
 * This file is part of The Storehouse. Copyright 2017 .
 *
 * This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
 * it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published
 * by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
 * (at your option) any later version.
 *
 * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
 * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
 * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
 * GNU Affero General Public License for more details.
 *
 * You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License
 * along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
 */
trait BrowserTrait
{

    /**
     * The project that we're working with for this request.
     *
     * @var Project
     */
    protected $project;

    /**
     * Entity manager to use to look up projects.
     *
     * @var EntityManagerInterface
     */
    protected $entityManager;

    /**
     * @required
     * @param EntityManagerInterface $dispatcher
     */
    public function setEntityManager(EntityManagerInterface $entityManager)
    {
        $this->entityManager = $entityManager;
    }

    /**
     * Get a project entity based on the URL string component.
     */
    protected function getProject(Request $request)
    {
        /* Load our project from the name in the request */
        $repo = $this->entityManager->getRepository('StorehouseBundle:Project');
        $project = $repo->findOneByName($request->get('project'));

        if (is_null($project)) {
            throw new NotFoundHttpException();
        }
        $this->project = $project;
    }
}

Now all the controller actions have to do is call the getProject function with the request for that specific action, and the leg work of getting the EntityManager is taken care of automatically. Since this is a very common action in Storehouse controller actions, this trait prevents repetitions code.

In this example, we’re doing this for a trait for use with controller classes, but you can in theory do this if you have a trait that is shared between services. Using the same annotation, the container injects the service and lets you define dependencies in both the constructor and in setter functions.

Gotcha: Controllers as Services

Symfony 3.3 defines your controllers as services and autowires them by default. This is the same process that makes the method injection work, but if your project started before Symfony 3.3, this isn’t setup by default. Setting up your controllers as services isn’t in the scope of this post, but it is imperative that it is setup for this method to work.

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