Question

We are creating a SaaS that monitors certain assets. This means it takes in data, saves it, and displays it in a webinterface.

For this, we have a few components that we created with/are moving to Symfony2:

• a frontend web application, where users can view their data
• a backend administrative web application, where we create new monitors, users, etc.
• an API
• an application that retrieves the received data from a queue and puts it in our database (this is now a seperate script, but I’m thinking of reworking this as a Symfony command that is called by cron)

All these four applications share the same model: our main database that holds all the users, monitors, and data.

My question is: how should I structure these projects in Symfony2?

1. Do I create a seperate bundle which holds the entities for my database, and have the four projects include those entities and work with them?
2. Can I make a ‘model’ directory in my Symfony app folder, which is used by all the bundles in my /src directory?
3. Some other, cleaner way to do this?

Option 1 seems a bit weird, since a bundle, to my understanding, needs routing, views, controllers, etc. Using it for just entities would be a bit weird.

Option 2 seems alright, since the /app folder is considered ‘communal’ anyway for everything that is in the /src folder (since, for example, parameters reside there as well). However, there is no ‘model’ folder there, and I’m not sure that there should be?

I understand that there are very few ‘best practices’ out already for Symfony 2, since it’s brand new. But I wanted to see if there are any practices more preferable then others, in your opinion.

Any feedback is more then welcome.
Thanks in advance,

Dieter

Answer 1

What I am currently doing is the first option: create a separate bundle for your entities.
That’s where I store fixtures, entities, forms and entity-related tests.

A bundle does NOT need to have routing, controllers, views etc. I’ve actually seen a blueprint bundle, and all it does is ship blueprint-css resources with it so they can be easily reused in projects.

As for adding models to the app directory… I wouldn’t like that. I see the app directory as a place where all the configuration should be. Even though you can override views under app/Resources, whenever I want to override something I create a new bundle.