My Symfony Controllers

Scott Pringle
1 min readJul 17, 2017

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Last week when I was presenting my “Events In Practice” talk at GlasgowPHP I had an example slide for a Symfony Controller like below:

<?phpnamespace Demo;class UserRegisterController
{

private $eventDispatcher;
public function __construct(EventDispatcherInterface $eventDispatcher)
{
$this->eventDispatcher = $eventDispatcher;
}
public function __invoke(Request $request)
{
$user = new User(...);
$this->eventDispatcher->dispatch(
'event.user_registered',
new UserRegistered(
$user
)
);
return new JsonResponse();
}
}

And I was asked about how I create my controllers with just an __invoke method, the secret? Declaring my Controllers As Services, while Symfony don't "recommend" this approach I find it allows me to keep control of my application structure much better.

The real magic happens in the routing file used

# app/config/routing.yml
hello:
path: /hello
defaults: { _controller: app.hello_controller }

By omitting the the :action from the default _controller tag Symfony (from 2.7+ I believe) will automatically call the __invoke method on the controller service.

If you want to read more about this structure of code organisation read up more on the ADR Design Pattern.

GlasgowPHP Slides

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Scott Pringle

Web & Software Developer | Microservice advocate (not yet an implementer) | EventSourcing admirer | #MUFC Supporter