New in Symfony 5.4: Controller Changes

Symfony Controllers are the „glue code“ that runs some logic and calls some
services to serve each application route. They are a very stable piece of software
that we rarely change. However, in Symfony 5.4 we’ve made some changes to controllers
that may impact your applications.

Deprecated the Request::get() Method

Contributed by
Roland Franssen
in #42392.

The Symfony Request Object is an object-oriented representation of the HTTP
request message. This object provides several methods to get information from the
incoming request:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
// retrieve information from $_GET
$request->query->get(‚id‘);
// retrieve information from $_POST
$request->request->get(‚category‘, ‚default category‘);
// retrieve information from $_SERVER
$request->server->get(‚HTTP_HOST‘);
// retrieve information from $_COOKIE
$request->cookies->get(‚PHPSESSID‘);

In addition to these specific methods, there’s a generic get() method that
looks for information in path (routing placeholders or custom attributes), $_GET,
and $_POST and returns the first value found:

1
2
// this information could come from route attributes, from $_GET or form $_POST
$request->get(‚id‘);

The flexibility of this method could be useful in some edge-cases, but it’s
generally better to be explicit about where does data come from. That’s why we’ve
been discouraging the usage of this method from some years and in Symfony 5.4
we’re marking it as private. You can still use it, but you’ll see deprecation
messages if you do, so it’s better if you start upgrading your applications.

Deprecated Some Controller Shortcuts

Contributed by
Fabien Potencier
in #42422
and #42442.

In early Symfony versions, you could access all your application services from
the controllers using the get() and has() methods:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
// src/Controller/SomeController.php
namespace AppController;

use SymfonyBundleFrameworkBundleControllerAbstractController;
use SymfonyComponentHttpFoundationResponse;
use SymfonyComponentRoutingAnnotationRoute;

class SomeController extends AbstractController
{
#[Route(…)]
public function someAction(): Response
{
$doctrine = $this->get(‚doctrine‘);
// …
}
}

Later we removed this feature because accessing the entire service container in
this way is considered an anti-pattern. Therefore, the get() method only allows
access to a very limited set of services related to controllers.

In Symfony 5.4 we’re deprecating the get() and has() methods entirely.
Instead, fetching services in controllers should use constructor or method
injection. Besides, controllers provide a series of shortcuts for the most common
operations. For example, to redirect to some route, you don’t need to inject
the UrlGeneratorInterface class to get the URL generator service. You can
optionally use the redirectToRoute() shortcut:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
#[Route(…)]
public function someAction(): Response
{
// …

return $this->redirectToRoute(‚…‘);
}

In addition to this change, we reviewed the list of shortcuts to see if we
should add or remove some. We decided to deprecate the following controller
shortcuts because they are not directly related to HTTP operations:

dispatchMessage()
getDoctrine()

Instead of using those shortcuts, inject the related services in the constructor
or the controller methods.

Sponsor the Symfony project.

Symfony Blog
Read More

Generated by Feedzy