How to deal with Form Collection on Symfony2 Beta?

Question

I have an entity User and an entity Address. There is a relation One-to-Many between User and Address :

    class User
    {
        /**
        * @orm:OneToMany(targetEntity="Address")
        */
        protected $adresses;

        [...]

    }

I have a class AddressType, and class UserType :

    class UserType extends AbstractType
    {
        public function buildForm(FormBuilder $builder, array $options)
        {
            $builder->add('addresses', 'collection', array('type' => new AddressType()));

        }

        [...]
    }

In my controller, I build form with :

    $form = $this->get('form.factory')->create(new UserType()); 

... and create view with :

    return array('form' => $form->createView());

I display form field in my twig template with :

    {{ form_errors(form.name) }}
    {{ form_label(form.name) }}
    {{ form_widget(form.name) }}
    [...]

Okay. Now, how to display fields for one or more addresses ? (it's no {{ for_widget(form.adresses.zipcode) }} nor {{ for_widget(form.adresses[0].zipcode) }} ...)

Any ideas ?

Answer 1

This is how I did it in my form template:

{{ form_errors(form.addresses) }}

{% for address in form.addresses %}
    <div id="{{ 'address%sDivId'|format(loop.index) }}" class="userAddressItem">
        <h5> Address #{{ loop.index }}</h5>

        {{ form_errors(address) }}
        {{ form_widget(address) }}
    </div>
{% endfor %}

And I have a small action bar, driven by jQuery, that lets the user add and remove addresses. It is a simple script appending a new div to the container with the right HTML code. For the HTML, I just used the same output has Symfony but with updated index. For example, this would be the output for the street input text of the AddressType form:

<input id="user_addresses_0_street" name="user[addresses][0][street]" ...>

Then, the next index Symfony will accept is 1 so the new input field you add would look like this:

<input id="user_addresses_1_street" name="user[addresses][1][street]" ...>

Note: The three dots are a remplacement for required="required" maxlength="255" but could change depending on your needs.

You will need more HTML code than that to add a whole new AddressType to the DOM of the browser but this give you the general idea.

Regards,
Matt

Answer 2

I should top that up with the fact that if you want to dynamically add fields, you need to set the key 'allow_add' to true in your collection field in UserType :

...

$builder->add('addresses', 'collection', array(
    'type' => new AddressType(),
    'allow_add' => true
));

Just spent hours trying to figure out what was missing, and at the time i'm writing the doc does not mention this yet. Hope it'll help fellow developers.