Question

I have a base controller for most of the controllers in my app like so:

class BaseController extends \Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Controller\Controller
{
    /**
     * 
     * @Route("/")
     */
    public function indexAction($partial = false)
    {
            $this->partial = $partial;
        $this->currentAction = 'index';

        return $this->r();
    }
}

This is accompanied by a pack of templates that can be either full html pages with a layout or just the content. This is done by a line in the templates:

{% extends this.partial ? "SomeProject:_base:partial.html.twig" : "SomeProject::layout.html.twig" %}

(where this is a the controller reference).

These templates can then be rendered in other controllers without the duplication of layout via.

{% render 'SomeProject:SomeController:index' with  { "partial":true }  %}

My problem with this approach is:

1. Every action that needs to be partial controller must have a $partial argument. Since most actions have the potential to be partial, all the controllers must be sprinkled with it.
2. Every potentially partial action must have the $this->partial = $partial line, which can be easily forgotten.

It there a cleaner way by using some Symfony or Twig magic (overriding the render tag etc. ). For getting rid of the above problems?

Answer 1

After some research and digging around in the internals I’ve come up with an elegant solution.

The answer is to build an Event Listener (covered in Symfony2 Docs). More precisely: a Controller Listener with the meat of the class looking like below. This allows for transparent handling of partial without any changes made to the Controller code.

class ControllerListener
{
    /**
     *
     * @param BaseController $ctrl
     * @param Request $request
     * @return BaseController 
     */
    public function injectPartial($ctrl,Request $request)
    {
        if ($ctrl instanceof BaseController)
        {
            if ($request->get("partial",false))
                $ctrl->setPartial($request->get ("partial"));
        }
        return $ctrl;
    }

    public function onKernelController(FilterControllerEvent $event)
    {
        $ctrl = $event->getController();
        $ctrl[0] = $this->injectPartial($ctrl[0], $event->getRequest());
        $event->setController($ctrl);
    }
}