Question

I’m working on a Symfony2 application, that I use to manage my monthly budget.

I have an entity Expense, with an amount column that is saved as a float in the db

/**
* @ORM\Table(name="expenses")
* @ORM\Entity
*/
class Expense
{

/**
 * @ORM\Column(name="amount", type="float", nullable=false)
 */
private $amount;

In my listing I want to display the amount as a string, like this:

public function getAmount()
{
    return '$'.number_format($this->amount, 2);
}

but when I go to my form to add a new expense, I get the following error:

Expected argument of type "numeric", "string" given

When I change the getAmount function to only return $this->amount, then I get no error.

How can I save the value of $amount as a float in the db, but display it as a string when viewing the value?

Update:

If I change the mapping to

@ORM\Column(name="amount", type="string", nullable=false)

then it works, but then my empty form gives me a value of $0,00 in the amount field, which isn’t what I want

Answer 1

If you want the listing to include the dollar sign then you can create another getter specifically for that purpose, eg:

public function getAmountWithCurrency()
{
    return '$'.number_format($this->amount, 2);
}

Your form will use the main getter associated with the field, ie getAmount() so it will never work if you return a string when the field type is numeric of some sort (float / integer / decimal).