Creating a Custom Admin Action

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This is a full working example of creating a custom list action for SonataAdmin. The example is based on an existing CarAdmin class in a App namespace. It is assumed you already have an admin service up and running.

The recipe

SonataAdmin provides a very straight-forward way of adding your own custom actions.

To do this we need to:

  • extend the SonataAdmin:CRUD Controller and tell our admin class to use it
  • create the custom action in our Controller
  • create a template to show the action in the list view
  • add the route and the new action in the Admin class

Extending the Admin Controller

First you need to create your own Controller extending the one from SonataAdmin:

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// src/Controller/CarAdminController.php

namespace App\Controller;

use Sonata\AdminBundle\Controller\CRUDController;

class CarAdminController extends CRUDController
{
    // ...
}

Admin classes by default use the SonataAdmin:CRUD controller, this is the third parameter of an admin service definition, you need to change it to your own.

Register the Admin as a Service

Either by using XML:

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<!-- config/services.xml -->

<service id="app.admin.car" class="App\Admin\CarAdmin">
    <tag name="sonata.admin" model_class="App\Entity\Car" controller="App\Controller\CarAdminController" manager_type="orm" group="Demo" label="Car"/>
</service>

or by adding it to your services.yaml:

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# config/services.yaml

services:
    app.admin.car:
        class: App\Admin\CarAdmin
        tags:
            - { name: sonata.admin, model_class: App\Entity\Car, controller: App\Controller\CarAdminController, manager_type: orm, group: Demo, label: Car }

For more information about service configuration please refer to Step 3 of Creating an Admin

Create the custom action in your Controller

Now it is time to actually create your custom action here, for this example I chose to implement a clone action:

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// src/Controller/CarAdminController.php

namespace App\Controller;

use Sonata\AdminBundle\Controller\CRUDController;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\RedirectResponse;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response;
use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\Exception\NotFoundHttpException;

class CarAdminController extends CRUDController
{
    /**
     * @param $id
     */
    public function cloneAction($id): Response
    {
        $object = $this->admin->getSubject();

        if (!$object) {
            throw new NotFoundHttpException(sprintf('unable to find the object with id: %s', $id));
        }

        // Be careful, you may need to overload the __clone method of your object
        // to set its id to null !
        $clonedObject = clone $object;

        $clonedObject->setName($object->getName().' (Clone)');

        $this->admin->create($clonedObject);

        $this->addFlash('sonata_flash_success', 'Cloned successfully');

        return new RedirectResponse($this->admin->generateUrl('list'));
    }
}

If you want to add the current filter parameters to the redirect url you can add them to the generateUrl() method:

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return new RedirectResponse(
    $this->admin->generateUrl('list', ['filter' => $this->admin->getFilterParameters()])
);

Here we first get the object, see if it exists then clone it and insert the clone as a new object. Finally we set a flash message indicating success and redirect to the list view.

Tip

If you want to render something here you can create new template anywhere, extend sonata layout and use sonata_admin_content block.

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{% extends '@SonataAdmin/standard_layout.html.twig' %}

{% block sonata_admin_content %}
    Your content here
{% endblock %}

Create a template for the new action

You need to tell SonataAdmin how to render your new action. You do that by creating a list__action_clone.html.twig in the namespace of your custom Admin Controller.

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{# templates/CRUD/list__action_clone.html.twig #}

<a class="btn btn-sm" href="{{ admin.generateObjectUrl('clone', object) }}">clone</a>

Right now clone is not a known route, we define it in the next step.

Bringing it all together

What is left now is actually adding your custom action to the admin class.

You have to add the new route in configureRoutes:

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use Sonata\AdminBundle\Route\RouteCollectionInterface;

protected function configureRoutes(RouteCollectionInterface $collection): void
{
    $collection
        ->add('clone', $this->getRouterIdParameter().'/clone');
}

This gives us a route like ../admin/app/car/1/clone. You could also write $collection->add('clone'); to get a route like ../admin/app/car/clone?id=1

Next we have to add the action in configureListFields specifying the template we created:

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protected function configureListFields(ListMapper $list): void
{
    $list
        ->add(ListMapper::NAME_ACTIONS, null, [
            'actions' => [

                // ...

                'clone' => [
                    'template' => '@App/CRUD/list__action_clone.html.twig',
                ],
            ],
        ]);
}

The full CarAdmin.php example looks like this:

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// src/Admin/CarAdmin.php

namespace App\Admin;

use Sonata\AdminBundle\Admin\AbstractAdmin;
use Sonata\AdminBundle\Datagrid\ListMapper;
use Sonata\AdminBundle\Route\RouteCollection;

final class CarAdmin extends AbstractAdmin
{
    protected function configureRoutes(RouteCollectionInterface $collection): void
    {
        $collection
            ->add('clone', $this->getRouterIdParameter().'/clone');
    }

    protected function configureListFields(ListMapper $list): void
    {
        $list
            ->addIdentifier('name')
            ->add('engine')
            ->add('rescueEngine')
            ->add('createdAt')
            ->add(ListMapper::NAME_ACTIONS, null, [
                'actions' => [
                    'show' => [],
                    'edit' => [],
                    'delete' => [],
                    'clone' => [
                        'template' => '@App/CRUD/list__action_clone.html.twig',
                    ]
                ]
            ]);
    }
}

Note

If you want to render a custom controller action in a template by using the render function in twig you need to add _sonata_admin as an attribute. For example; {{ render(controller('App\\Controller\\XxxxCRUDController::comment', {'_sonata_admin': 'sonata.admin.xxxx' })) }}. This has to be done because the moment the rendering should happen the routing, which usually sets the value of this parameter, is not involved at all, and then you will get an error "There is no _sonata_admin defined for the controller AppControllerXxxxCRUDController and the current route ' '."

Custom Action without Entity

Creating an action that is not connected to an Entity is also possible. Let's imagine we have an import action. We register our route:

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use Sonata\AdminBundle\Route\RouteCollectionInterface;

protected function configureRoutes(RouteCollectionInterface $collection): void
{
    $collection->add('import');
}

and the controller action:

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// src/Controller/CarAdminController.php

namespace App\Controller;

use Sonata\AdminBundle\Controller\CRUDController;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response;

final class CarAdminController extends CRUDController
{
    public function importAction(Request $request): Response
    {
        // do your import logic
    }

Now, instead of adding the action to the form mapper, we can add it next to the add button. In your admin class, overwrite the configureActionButtons method:

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protected function configureActionButtons(array $buttonList, string $action, ?object $object = null): array
{
    $buttonList['import'] = ['template' => 'import_button.html.twig'];

    return $buttonList;
}

Create a template for that button:

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<li>
    <a class="sonata-action-element" href="{{ admin.generateUrl('import') }}">
        <i class="fas fa-level-up-alt"></i> {{ 'import_action'|trans({}, 'SonataAdminBundle') }}
    </a>
</li>

You can also add this action to your dashboard actions, you have to overwrite the getDashboardActions method in your admin class and there are two ways you can add action:

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protected function configureDashboardActions(array $actions): array
{
    $actions['import'] = ['template' => 'import_dashboard_button.html.twig'];

    return $actions;
}

Create a template for that button:

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<a class="btn btn-link btn-flat" href="{{ admin.generateUrl('import') }}">
    <i class="fas fa-level-up-alt"></i> {{ 'import_action'|trans({}, 'SonataAdminBundle') }}
</a>

Or you can pass values as array:

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protected function configureDashboardActions(array $actions): array
{
    $actions['import'] = [
        'label' => 'import_action',
        'translation_domain' => 'SonataAdminBundle',
        'url' => $this->generateUrl('import'),
        'icon' => 'level-up-alt',
    ];

    return $actions;
}
This work, including the code samples, is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.
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