Question

Is it possible to prevent direct access to an action in symfony. The action is only accessible by “forward” only. So basically, a way to see if the request is coming from another action.

I’m trying to achieve this because the first action handles plenty of verifications then if it fails, it stays on that action. If it succeed, it will forward to an appropriate action; this action needs to have safe inputs (validated from the first action). In order to keep the code DRY, the second action doesn’t need to re-verify all the inputs again.

Then why not doing simply a private method? The second action is sort of a plugin, it’s decided on the fly where it’s going from the first one, that action has its own set of other future action/template. It makes more sense to simply forward instead of trying to handle plenty of cases that Symfony already takes care of.

Answer 1

There are multiple ways to achieve this.

1) Make sure your action isn’t accessible by the routing. If you have wildcard routes this will be harder, but you can always add a route which would point the url for your action to a 404 page. Add something like this to your routing.yml:

disabled_action:
  url: /disabledController/disabledAction
  params: { module: default, action: error404 }

2) Check the action stack upon executing your action. The action stack let’s you know from which action you were redirected. You can access it within your action using $this->getController()->getActionStack(). If the getSize() is bigger than 1 (in a default configuration) you we’re forwarded.