New in Symfony 6.2: Built-in Cache, Security, Template and Doctrine Attributes

Symfony 6.2 will be released at the end of November 2022. This is the first article of the series that shows the most important new features introduced by Symfony 6.2.

Contributed by
Nicolas Grekas and Jérémy Derussé in #43854, #46880, #46906, and #46907.

Symfony introduced annotations to configure cache, security, templates and Doctrine more than 10 years ago. They were available via an external bundle called SensioFrameworkExtraBundle.

With the introduction of PHP attributes, we turned those annotations into attributes. However, you still had to install sensio/framework-extra-bundle package to use them. For example:

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use Sensio\Bundle\FrameworkExtraBundle\Configuration\IsGranted;
use Sensio\Bundle\FrameworkExtraBundle\Configuration\ParamConverter;
use Symfony\Component\Routing\Annotation\Route;

#[Route('/comment/{postSlug}/new', methods: ['POST'], name: 'comment_new')]
#[IsGranted('IS_AUTHENTICATED_FULLY')]
#[ParamConverter('post', options: ['mapping' => ['postSlug' => 'slug']])]
public function addComment(Request $request, Post $post): Response
{
    // ...
}

In Symfony 6.2, we've introduced #[Cache], #[Template], #[IsGranted] and #[MapEntity] as native attributes, so you no longer need to install any external package to use them. #[IsGranted] replaces and improves the previous @Security() annotation and #[MapEntity] replaces the previous @ParamConverter annotation.

In most applications, you will only need to update the imported namespace, without having to change anything in your code:

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-use Sensio\Bundle\FrameworkExtraBundle\Configuration\IsGranted;
+use Symfony\Component\Security\Http\Attribute\IsGranted;
-use Sensio\Bundle\FrameworkExtraBundle\Configuration\Cache;
+use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\Attribute\Cache;

The #[MapEntity] feature (available when using DoctrineBundle >= 2.7.1) works just like #[ParamConverter]: in most situations you don't need to use the attribute at all, it's automatic.

However, if you previously used #[ParamConverter] to customize your configuration, you'll need to make some changes to turn it into the new #[MapEntity] attribute. Also, the new attribute is applied to properties, instead of to the entire method:

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-use Sensio\Bundle\FrameworkExtraBundle\Configuration\ParamConverter;
+use Symfony\Bridge\Doctrine\Attribute\MapEntity;

 // ...
-#[ParamConverter('post', options: ['mapping' => ['postSlug' => 'slug']])]
-public function addComment(Request $request, Post $post): Response
+public function addComment(
+    Request $request,
+    #[MapEntity(mapping: ['postSlug' => 'slug'])] Post $post
+): Response
 {
     // ...
 }

We believe that PHP attributes are a great way to add metadata configuration to code. However, if you don't like them, you can skip them and keep configuring things in XML/YAML or directly in PHP code.