Symfony Controllers are the "glue code" that runs some logic and calls some services to serve each application route. They are a very stable piece of software that we rarely change. However, in Symfony 5.4 we've made some changes to controllers that may impact your applications.

Deprecated the Request::get() Method

Roland Franssen
Contributed by Roland Franssen in #42392

The Symfony Request Object is an object-oriented representation of the HTTP request message. This object provides several methods to get information from the incoming request:

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// retrieve information from $_GET
$request->query->get('id');
// retrieve information from $_POST
$request->request->get('category', 'default category');
// retrieve information from $_SERVER
$request->server->get('HTTP_HOST');
// retrieve information from $_COOKIE
$request->cookies->get('PHPSESSID');

In addition to these specific methods, there's a generic get() method that looks for information in path (routing placeholders or custom attributes), $_GET, and $_POST and returns the first value found:

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// this information could come from route attributes, from $_GET or form $_POST
$request->get('id');

The flexibility of this method could be useful in some edge-cases, but it's generally better to be explicit about where does data come from. That's why we've been discouraging the usage of this method from some years and in Symfony 5.4 we're marking it as private. You can still use it, but you'll see deprecation messages if you do, so it's better if you start upgrading your applications.

Deprecated Some Controller Shortcuts

Fabien Potencier
Contributed by Fabien Potencier in #42422 and #42442

In early Symfony versions, you could access all your application services from the controllers using the get() and has() methods:

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// src/Controller/SomeController.php
namespace App\Controller;

use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Controller\AbstractController;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response;
use Symfony\Component\Routing\Annotation\Route;

class SomeController extends AbstractController
{
    #[Route(...)]
    public function someAction(): Response
    {
        $doctrine = $this->get('doctrine');
        // ...
    }
}

Later we removed this feature because accessing the entire service container in this way is considered an anti-pattern. Therefore, the get() method only allows access to a very limited set of services related to controllers.

In Symfony 5.4 we're deprecating the get() and has() methods entirely. Instead, fetching services in controllers should use constructor or method injection. Besides, controllers provide a series of shortcuts for the most common operations. For example, to redirect to some route, you don't need to inject the UrlGeneratorInterface class to get the URL generator service. You can optionally use the redirectToRoute() shortcut:

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#[Route(...)]
public function someAction(): Response
{
    // ...

    return $this->redirectToRoute('...');
}

In addition to this change, we reviewed the list of shortcuts to see if we should add or remove some. We decided to deprecate the following controller shortcuts because they are not directly related to HTTP operations:

  • dispatchMessage()
  • getDoctrine()

Instead of using those shortcuts, inject the related services in the constructor or the controller methods.

Published in #Living on the edge