Which is the suggested place to modify binded form data in Symfony?

Question

I've a form for creating a new Customer. A customer may have a mobile number. Mobile number should be persisted without + or 00 prefix that user can type. This can be accomplished easly with:

$customer->setMobile(preg_replace("/^(\+|00)/", '', $customer->getMobile()));

Which is the best place to put this code?

• Inside a CustomerController prior to call entity manager and persist the entity. Is this really a matter of a controller in MVC pattern?
• Using a SanitizeCustomerSubscriber and listening to FormEvents:POST_BIND event
• Using a CustomerSanitizer service

Any other idea? Of course i'm speaking of data manipulation in general, mobile number is just an example: fields to be sanitized could be more than just one.

Answer 1

You should do this in the PRE_BIND event, where you can access the submitted data before it is being processed.

$builder->addEventListener(FormEvents::PRE_BIND, function (FormEvent $event) {
    $data = $event->getData();
    if (isset($data['mobile'])) {
        $data['mobile'] = preg_replace("/^(\+|00)/", '', $data['mobile']);
    }
    $event->setData($data);
});

For the record, as of Symfony 2.3, this event is called PRE_SUBMIT.