New in Symfony 4.1: Invokable event listeners

January 26, 2018 • Published by Javier Eguiluz

Warning: This post is about an unsupported Symfony version. Some of this information may be out of date. Read the most recent Symfony Docs.

Contributed by Roland Franssen in #25275

In Symfony 4 applications it's recommended to manage events using subscribers instead of listeners because only subscribers are automatically configured when using service autoconfiguration.

However, for those still wanting to use listeners, in Symfony 4.1 we improved them to support the __invoke() PHP magic method. Consider the following service configuration:

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        # config/services.yaml
App\EventListener\UserListener:
    tags: [{ name: kernel.event_listener, event: kernel.request }]
    

When the kernel.event_listener tag doesn't define the method attribute, Symfony executes the method whose name is on + CamelCased event name. In this example, the onKernelRequest() method will be executed. In Symfony 4.1, if the event listener class doesn't define that method, Symfony looks for the __invoke() method and executes it if it's found.

In practice, in Symfony 4.1 the UserListener class could be simply:

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        use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\Event\GetResponseEvent;

class UserListener
{
    public function __invoke(GetResponseEvent $event)
    {
        // ...
    }
}
    

Related to this, we've silently added support for __invoke() in other parts of the framework, such as the TemplateController:

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        # config/routes.yaml
index:
    path: /
    # before Symfony 4.1 you must add the 'templateAction' method name
    controller: 'Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Controller\TemplateController::templateAction'
    # starting from Symfony 4.1, TemplateController includes an __invoke() method
    controller: 'Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Controller\TemplateController'
    defaults:
      template: 'homepage.html.twig'
    

Published in #Living on the edge

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Comments

Chris Wilkinson said on Jan 26, 2018 at 12:15

TemplateController change was also 4.1?

Javier Eguiluz Certified said on Jan 26, 2018 at 13:51

@Chris you are right! It was merged on December 4 (https://github.com/symfony/symfony/pull/24637) so it's not included in Symfony 3.4/4.0 but 4.1. I've updated the article. Thanks!

Guillaume Loulier Certified said on Jan 26, 2018 at 16:27

Really good news, finally we can create a Listener which can listen to a single event without creating an "on" method.

Question, does this approach works with Subscriber?

Sebastiaan Stok Certified said on Jan 28, 2018 at 13:16

Question, does this approach works with Subscriber?

Technically yes, but for a subscriber (your class indicates which events it listeners for) so you need to specify the method you want to call. Not sure if __invoke is automatically used here. Best to have a look at the code to know for sure :)

Vlad Riabchenko Certified said on Jan 29, 2018 at 11:16

Question, does this approach works with Subscriber?

Yes, this will work :

public static function getSubscribedEvents() { return [ KernelEvents::REQUEST => '__invoke' ]; }

But IMHO you should give more meaningful names to your methods.

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