New in Symfony 5.4: Controller Changes

Symfony 5.4 is backed by:
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
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:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
// 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:
1 2
// 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
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:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
// 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:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
#[Route(...)]
public function someAction(): Response
{
// ...
return $this->redirectToRoute('...');
}
In addition to this change, we reviewed the list of shortcuts to see if we should add or remove some. We decided to deprecate the following controller shortcuts because they are not directly related to HTTP operations:
dispatchMessage()
getDoctrine()
Instead of using those shortcuts, inject the related services in the constructor or the controller methods.
Help the Symfony project!
As with any Open-Source project, contributing code or documentation is the most common way to help, but we also have a wide range of sponsoring opportunities.
Comments
Comments are closed.
To ensure that comments stay relevant, they are closed for old posts.
> [...] fetching services in controllers should use constructor or method injection.
What about the implementation of the `ServiceSubscriberInterface` (e.g. on the `\Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Controller\AbstractController`)?
The "smaller" container is not a recommanded way?
For example, I like this approach when I have two public actions in my Controller that use the same one private method that requires a service. I don't want to inject the service in the two actions because it is the private method that depends on it directly (and I don't want to inject it in the constructor because I could have a 3rd action that doesn't depend on it).
In addition: shouldn't the `ServiceSubscriberInterface`/`ServiceSubscriberTrait` be considered as a wa of "Injection Type"?(https://symfony.com/doc/current/service_container/injection_types.html)
Do I need to add Serializer to my controllers manually?
This change will ruin me mate :P
Can we still get Doctrine from the CI?? "$this->container->get()"??
My colleagues tend to use `getDoctrine()`, mostly because it's in the `make:crud` scaffolding a lot.
I try to inject Repositories where I can, but if you must persist/flush/remove something I always inject the EntityManager...