New in Symfony 2.5: Create the Correct Denied HTTP Exception

February 5, 2014 Fabien Potencier

Do you know the difference between Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\Exception\AccessDeniedHttpException and Symfony\Component\Security\Core\Exception\AccessDeniedException?

Their names look very similar and both deal with resources for which the user does not have access. But which one should you use in a controller? This is probably counter-intuitive, but you should use Symfony\Component\Security\Core\Exception\AccessDeniedException. And when using an IDE, you might import the wrong exception pretty easily. As this is a frequent mistake, we even added a rule about this on SensioLabsInsight (and this violation is triggered quite often).

As of 2.5, you can now rely on a helper method that does the right thing (if you are using the Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Controller\Controller base class):

throw $this->createAccessDeniedException('You cannot access this page!');

By the way, Symfony\Component\Security\Core\Exception\AccessDeniedException is the exception class you want to use because it is automatically caught by the Symfony Security Firewall, which generates the correct response for the user.

Comments

FredV said on Feb 5, 2014 at 15:32 #1

So when to use such a "Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\Exception\AccessDeniedHttpException" ?

Piotr Gołębiewski said on Feb 5, 2014 at 22:16 #2

@FredVelcro it's used internally and thrown by Symfony/Component/HttpKernel/EventListener/FragmentListener when the request is invalid or it comes from an untrusted ip

Piotr Gołębiewski said on Feb 5, 2014 at 22:20 #3

Judgeing by use cases, I'd say the AccessDeniedHttpException is used when the request itself is rejected, and AccessDeniedException is used when user has not enough credentials to access the resource.

Sidora Gleb said on Feb 6, 2014 at 08:27 #4

@Piotr Gołębiewski
If the exception is specific to Fragments sub-framework it's namespace should explicitly reference `fragments`

kor3k kor3k said on Feb 9, 2014 at 14:20 #5

@FredVelcro or where you intentionally do not want to trigger the firewall handler

Michal Mojzesz said on Feb 11, 2014 at 10:57 #6

Thank you! I was writing about that two years ago. Not because of mistakes using wrong exception, but rather because I think 403 is also very often used exception in controllers.

https://github.com/symfony/symfony/issues/4297

JeanBar said on Mar 28, 2014 at 13:45 #7

You seems to perfectly now that the name you've choosen sucks.
Instead of correcting it, you keep in the same path and add a useless method.

Why the don't you deprecate something you failed in design ?

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