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Gyro MVCBundle

A small framework on top of Symfony introducing a bunch of conventions, targeting users that want to upgrade from LTS to LTS.

MVCBUndle decouples and simplifies Symfony controllers by adding various abstractions that avoid having to use Symfony services or classes inside the controllers.

This bundle succeeds the "QafooLabsNoFrameworkBundle" package.

Goals

This allows to write controllers that only have dependencies on the domain/model and let them act as true "application services" that are easily testable.

Gyros goal is achieving slim controllers that are registered as a service explicitly (via YML or XML). The number of services required in any controller should be very small (2-4). We believe Context to controllers should be explicitly passed to avoid hiding it in services.

Ultimately this should make Controllers testable with lightweight unit- and integration tests. Elaborate seperation of Symfony from your business logic should become unnecessary by building controllers that don't depend on Symfony from the beginning (except maybe Request/Response classes).

Installation

From Packagist via Composer:

Add bundle to your application kernel:

Returning View data from controllers

Returning Arrays

This bundle replaces the @Extra\Template() annotation support from the Sensio FrameworkExtraBundle, without requiring to add the annotation to the controller actions.

You can just return arrays from controllers and the template names will be inferred from Controller+Action-Method names.

If you return from the App\Controller default namespace, then the template is fetched from ':Ctrl:action.html.twig`.

Returning TemplateView

Two use-cases sometimes occur where returning an array from the controller is not flexible enough:

1. Rendering a template with a different action name.
2. Adding headers to the Response object

For this case you can change the previous example to return a TemplateView instance:

Note: Contrary to the render() method on the default Symfony base controller here the view parameters and the template name are exchanged. This is because everything except the view parameters are optional.

Returning ViewModels

Usually controllers quickly gather view related logic that is not properly extracted into a Twig extension, because of the insignficance of these data transforming methods. This is why on top of the returning array support you can also use view models and return them from your actions.

Each view model is a class that maps to exactly one template and can contain properties + methods that are available under the view template name in Twig using the same resolving mechanism as if you are returing arrays.

A view model can be any class as long as it does not extend the Symfony Response class.

In your controller you just return the view model:

It gets rendered as :Hello:hello.html.twig, where the view model is available as the view twig variable:

You can optionally extend from Gyro\MVC\ViewStruct. Every ViewStruct implementation has a constructor accepting and setting key-value pairs of properties that exist on the view model class.

Redirect Route

Redirecting in Symfony is much more likely to happen internally to a given route. The Gyro\MVC\RedirectRoute can be returned from your controller and a listener will turn it into a proper Symfony RedirectResponse:

If you want to set headers or different status code you can pass a Response as third argument, which will be used instead of creating a new one.

Add Cookies, Flash Messages, Cache Headers

when returning a View model, array or redirect route from a controller, without direct access to the response there is no easy way to add response headers. This is where PHP generators come in and you can yield additional response metadata:

Execute code after the response was sent

For a simple way to delay work from the controller to Symfony's kernel.terminate event the Gyro's yield applier abstraction handles a AfterResponseTask that accepts a closure to be executed after Response::send is called via event subscriber.

Inject TokenContext into actions

In Symfony access to security related information is available through the security.context service. This is bad from a design perspective, because it introduces a stateful service whenever access to security related information is needed.

To avoid access to the security state from a service, it needs to be passed as arguments, starting with the controller action.

That is what the TokenContext class is for. Just add a typehint for it to any action and MVCBundle will pass this object into your action. From it you have access to various security related methods:

The methods getCurrentUser and getToken expect a concrecte class name string as first argument, in this example it is MyUser::class. This is used with Psalm template annotations to improve static analysis.

In unit tests where you want to test the controller you can use the MockTokenContext instead. It doesnt work with complex isGranted() checks or the token, but if you only use the user object it allows very simple test setup.

Working with FormRequest

Handling forms in Symfony typically leads to complicated, untestable controller actions that are very tightly coupled to various Symfony services. To avoid having to deal with form.factory inside a controller we introduced a specialized request object that hides all this:

In tests you can use new Gyro\MVC\Form\InvalidFormRequest() and new Gyro\MVC\Form\ValidFormRequest($validData) to work with forms in tests for controllers.

ParamConverter for Session

You can pass the session as an argument to a controller:

Convert Exceptions

Usually the libraries you are using or your own code throw exceptions that can be turned into HTTP errors other than the 500 server error. To prevent having to do this in the controller over and over again you can configure to convert those exceptions in a listener:

Notable facts about the conversion:

• Both Target Exception classes or just a HTTP StatusCode can be specified
• Subclasses are checked for as well.
• If you don't define conversions the listener is not registered.
• If an exception is converted the original exception will specifically logged before conversion. That means when an exception occurs it will be logged twice.

The following excpetions are registered by default:

EventDispatcher Adapter

The API of Symfony EventDispatcher changed in special way between version 3 and 4 and will again in 5. You don't pass the event name anymore, as required first argument but now you may pass it as optional second argument. This was done to align Symfony with PSR-14 (Event-Dispatcher).

The migration path for this code is a bit annoying and when using Psalm will lead to violations that need to be suppressed.

Gyro ships an adapter for the EventDispatcher that avoids this problem. Its API is PSR-14 API compatible, but does not implement the interface. It then delegates to Symfony event dispatchers correctly.

Inject the service gyro_mvc.event_dispatcher instead of the event_dispatcher service.