Question

Say I have three fields for a user to enter a date: day, month, and year. (Likely not the best way, but I’m using it for this example). If I try to $form->bind() the user’s request, Symfony will try and look for a ->setMonth() method on my model, which doesn’t exist.

How do I tell Symfony that I want to run the input through strtotime() (or any other any other arbitrary code or method) before, and then map the new output to setDate()?

Answer 1

First of all, you need to tell symfony that these fields do not have a corresponding Entity property. This is done with the ‘property_path’ option doing something like this

$builder->add("field1", "text", array(
    "property_path" => false
));

In your controller, once you have checked that the form is valid and before persisting the entity you can get the values of these fields using something like:

$field1 = $form->get('field1')->getData();

and then use these values to construct your entity property as you need, for example:

$entity->setWhatever($field1.$field2.$field3);

If you need to do some sort of validation on these fields, your best option is to write a callback validator.