Question

I have an entity with a OneToOne association to another entity. For these purposes I’ll call the initial entity “Parent” and the associated Entity “Child”.

I have a Parent form working fine that embeds the child form and all the form elements for both entities appear, and I can save the data fine in the controller.

Now I want to set defaults for a number of attributes in the embedded doctrine entity. I could set values for the new entity in the controller, but the child entity is created in the embedded form class:

// Parent form
class Parent extends AbstractType
{

    public function buildForm(FormBuilder $builder, array $options)
    {
         //parent->add(...) 
         $builder->add('child', new Child(), array());
    }

// In Child Form
class Child extends AbstractType
{
    public function buildForm(FormBuilder $builder, array $options)
    {

        $builder->add('visibilitycode', 'entity', array('label' => 'Visibility', 'class'=>'Acme\MyBundle\Entity\Visibility', 'property'=>'name'));
        public function getDefaultOptions(array $options)
        {
            return array(
                'data_class' => 'Acme\MyBundle\Entity\Child',
            );
        }

Many of these defaults are for associated foreign keys, so if I was setting them in the controller I might use something like this:

$child->setVisibilityCode($em->getReference('AcmeMybundle:Visibility', 'P'));

Answer 1

Two solutions are offered to you (or maybe more 🙂 ):

• initialize default values in Child entity itself ( in constructor for example)

• use the empty_data option of the Form component:

  class Child extends AbstractType {
  public function buildForm(FormBuilder $builder, array $options)
  {
  
      $builder->add('visibilitycode', 'entity', array(
          'label' => 'Visibility', 
          'class'=>'Acme\MyBundle\Entity\Visibility',
          'property'=>'name'
      ));
      public function getDefaultOptions(array $options)
      {
          return array(
              'data_class' => 'Acme\MyBundle\Entity\Child',
              'empty_data' => function() use($visibility) {
                  $child = new Child();
                  $child->setVisibility($visibility);
                  return $child;
              }
          );
       }
  }