I'm trying to come up with a way to create a 'base form' that contains fields used on every entity, i.e. id, created_at, updated_at, etc.
I want to either extend the base form when I create a new form or easily include it in each new form I make. I can't find much documentation on it, is this a common thing to do?
Related
The objective:
Having a many-to-many relation be displayed as a dynamic list of select inputs(single choice dropdown list)
User arrives on page with a single select field (multiple = false) populated with persisted entities and add/remove buttons. By clicking the add button, a new select field with the same options appears below the first, which adds a new entry in the M2M relation. By clicking remove the field disappears and the entry should be removed.
The model:
Two entities: User & Manager. A User has exactly one "special" Manager and unlimited normal Managers.
Managers manage unlimited users.To model this I have created two relationships for which the user is the "owner" (not sure how to translate this)
ManyToOne specialManager
ManyToMany normalManagers
I haven't created a many to many relationship with attribute "special" because the requirement is exactly one special manager and I wasn't sure if Symfony/Doctrine would cause problems down the line.
What I have:
I can display a multiple select field with the existing entities using Entity field type, as per the documentation. Functionally this is what I need, visually it is not.
I can also use the Collection field type to display a single text field, and add or remove more with JS, as per the documentation. Visually this is what I need, but The text fields (entity attribute) need to be replaced by choice field.
The question:
Before I continue digging, is there a simple way to achieve this list of select tags?
For anyone else who may eventually need a dynamic list of select fields:
I initially solved this issue by detaching the field(s) in event listeners, and handling the display/submission manually in the controller.
However I wasn't satisfied with this clunky solution and when I encountered the same need I used a second solution: creating an intermediary entity xxxChoice (in this case ManagerChoice) which is Mto1 inversed related to User and Mto1 related to Manager. Then by creating a ManagerChoiceType form with "Manager" entity field type I was able to easily display my collection of dropdown select lists.
I have a ProductCategory class that has a parent and some children, properly annotated using Doctrine.
Then I have a ProductCategoryType (form class) that I use to render the html form.
Doctrine does its magic and creates a select box for parent which consists of previously added categories.
My problem: How to I prepend a default option (say '0' => 'No parent category') and how do I remove a particular category from list (ex: the currently edited category, so user can't select the very category to be its own parent)?
This can easily be achieved by using DataTransformers.
You can find more information in the documentation chapter How to use Data Transformers.
I am making a ZF2 app. I am using entities, mappers and services (e.g. UserEntity, UserMapper, UserService) to manage the objects/models. Properties in the entities are CamalCased (e.g. FirstName, LastName) while in the database, fields are using underscore (first_name, last_name). I will plan to use a hydrator to map the properties and db-fields when retrieving or saving. The service object (UserService) will be used to communicate with the mapper to retrieve and save data models using the mapper. The hydrator will convert the result of mapper and convert them into proper entities.
The thing I am confused is that when the service (UserService) need to provide some cirteria - for example to find all users with a specific 'last name', will the service use the database field names (last_name) or entity properties name (LastName)?
If the db field name is used in the Service, so any change in the db structure will require me to update the service also, which completely fails the reason of using the whole approach.
If you take a look at the ClassMethods:hydrate method (https://github.com/zendframework/zf2/blob/master/library/Zend/Stdlib/Hydrator/ClassMethods.php) you will see that it just copies the properties from one object to another. You have the option of converting the property names to/from camelCase but that's it.
If you change a column name in your database then you will need to change corresponding property name in your object. And vice versa. Which I believe is the crux of your question?
If you want to make table column names be independent of your method names then you need something that lets you define an actual mapping table somewhere. Change a column or method name and you only need to update the configuration mapping table.
Not a ZF2 expert so I could be wrong but it doesn't look like any of the supplied hydrators support this.
I do know that Doctrine 2 supports it.
I have two entities: product and category (Symfony 2.3).
I want to create a form in which an user can choose a product by first selecting the category. A user selects the category by clicking on image, then I want to set the image's value into a hidden input, but I don't see how can I change a foreign entity choice list to a hidden input (http://symfony.com/doc/current/reference/forms/types/entity.html).
How can I accomplish this? (how to change form input to hidden)
If I set cascade validation to true, will it for example check if a category really exist. (To prevent putting products with non-existing category from malicious users) ?
Part 1
To do this you need to use a data transformer to do two things:
transform an entity into an identifier that is either a string or integer so a form can render it as a hidden field.
transform the string or integer identifier into the entity when the form is submitted so that the parent entity can be saved with the correct relationship
The symfony docs I linked to above (here too) actually walk though an entire example of using a data transformer with a form.
As a shameless plug (because I believe it is helpful) I have written a little tutorial on using a data transformer for a hidden field with an entity id: http://lrotherfield.com/blog/symfony2-forms-entity-as-hidden-field/
Part 2
If you are using the data transformer then you don't need to worry about malicious users. The data transformer will fail because it will not be able to reverse transform the category from the fake id. In my tutorial the transformer will throw a Symfony\Component\Form\Exception\TransformationFailedException exception.
You can also write a validator (potentially using a call back) if you wanted that checks that the submitted category is real if you want an error to show in the form. Doctrine wont allow you to persist a fake category relationship as the foreign key constraint will fail.
I am using Breeze (http://www.breezejs.com/) and to use the functionality I want it requires mapping to a complete entity and all of its fields. I have a "Person" entity, but it includes a Social Security Number field. I want to keep this SSN# field private so I would like to create an entity named SubSetPerson that is updateable, has navigation properties and only contains the columns I want (e.g. ID, FirstName, LastName, myNavigationProperty) and does not contain the SSN#. I am using database/model first. Is this possible?
If you are using database first, then you could create a view for that table which only selects the columns you want. Then update the EF model browser to include that view.
Try using a Master-Detail type structure for your person. The master table would contain the person's public information; ie name, birthdate, etc... The detail table would contain only the more sensitive information (SSN, etc...). Then depending on your needs you can load the detail or not.