Question

I currently have the option in my application for a user to select favorite Items from a list. The form element is of type Entity and shows the list of objects. Users can select a number of them as their personal favorite.

However, although the list must show Items, what has to be stored is actually a FavoritedItem (which contains extra information about when/how the user favorited his Item).

I cannot figure out how to convert the entity types so that the user can pick from a list of Item entities but that the form stores FavoritedItems connected to the user.

Answer 1

I guess your entity has a relationship with FavoritedItem, when you are creating your form, don’t include that field, but a dummy field to contain the data the user selected:

$builder->add('favs', null, array('property_path' => false, 'type'='entity'.....));

Find this line:

    if ($form->isValid()) {
        // perform some action, such as saving the task to the database

        return $this->redirect($this->generateUrl('task_success'));
    }

and for each of your items, set the appropriate FavoritedItem on your entity. It would look something like:

$favorites = $form->get('favs')->getData();

foreach($favorites as $f){
    $FavItem = new FavoritedItem($f);
    $yourEntity->addFavorite($FavItem);
}