How to Create Event Listeners and Subscribers

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How to Create Event Listeners and Subscribers

During the execution of a Symfony application, lots of event notifications are triggered. Your application can listen to these notifications and respond to them by executing any piece of code.

Internal events provided by Symfony itself are defined in the KernelEvents class. Third-party bundles and libraries also trigger lots of events and your own application can trigger custom events.

All the examples shown in this article use the same KernelEvents::EXCEPTION event for consistency purposes. In your own application, you can use any event and even mix several of them in the same subscriber.

Creating an Event Listener

The most common way to listen to an event is to register an event listener:

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        // src/AppBundle/EventListener/ExceptionListener.php
namespace AppBundle\EventListener;

use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\Event\GetResponseForExceptionEvent;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response;
use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\Exception\HttpExceptionInterface;

class ExceptionListener
{
    public function onKernelException(GetResponseForExceptionEvent $event)
    {
        // You get the exception object from the received event
        $exception = $event->getException();
        $message = sprintf(
            'My Error says: %s with code: %s',
            $exception->getMessage(),
            $exception->getCode()
        );

        // Customize your response object to display the exception details
        $response = new Response();
        $response->setContent($message);

        // HttpExceptionInterface is a special type of exception that
        // holds status code and header details
        if ($exception instanceof HttpExceptionInterface) {
            $response->setStatusCode($exception->getStatusCode());
            $response->headers->replace($exception->getHeaders());
        } else {
            $response->setStatusCode(500);
        }

        // Send the modified response object to the event
        $event->setResponse($response);
    }
}
    

Tip

Each event receives a slightly different type of $event object. For the kernel.exception event, it is GetResponseForExceptionEvent. To see what type of object each event listener receives, see KernelEvents or the documentation about the specific even you're listening to.

Now that the class is created, you just need to register it as a service and notify Symfony that it is a "listener" on the kernel.exception event by using a special "tag":

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        # app/config/services.yml
services:
    app.exception_listener:
        class: AppBundle\EventListener\ExceptionListener
        tags:
            - { name: kernel.event_listener, event: kernel.exception }
    

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        <!-- app/config/services.xml -->
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<container xmlns="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services/services-1.0.xsd">

    <services>
        <service id="app.exception_listener"
            class="AppBundle\EventListener\ExceptionListener">

            <tag name="kernel.event_listener" event="kernel.exception" />
        </service>
    </services>
</container>
    

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        // app/config/services.php
$container
    ->register('app.exception_listener', 'AppBundle\EventListener\ExceptionListener')
    ->addTag('kernel.event_listener', array('event' => 'kernel.exception'))
;
    

Note

There is an optional tag attribute called method which defines which method to execute when the event is triggered. By default the name of the method is on + "camel-cased event name". If the event is kernel.exception the method executed by default is onKernelException().

The other optional tag attribute is called priority, which defaults to 0 and it controls the order in which listeners are executed (the highest the priority, the earlier a listener is executed). This is useful when you need to guarantee that one listener is executed before another. The priorities of the internal Symfony listeners usually range from -255 to 255 but your own listeners can use any positive or negative integer.

Creating an Event Subscriber

Another way to listen to events is via an event subscriber, which is a class that defines one or more methods that listen to one or various events. The main difference with the event listeners is that subscribers always know which events they are listening to.

In a given subscriber, different methods can listen to the same event. The order in which methods are executed is defined by the priority parameter of each method (the higher the priority the earlier the method is called). To learn more about event subscribers, read The EventDispatcher Component.

The following example shows an event subscriber that defines several methods which listen to the same kernel.exception event:

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        // src/AppBundle/EventSubscriber/ExceptionSubscriber.php
namespace AppBundle\EventSubscriber;

use Symfony\Component\EventDispatcher\EventSubscriberInterface;
use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\Event\GetResponseForExceptionEvent;
use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\KernelEvents;

class ExceptionSubscriber implements EventSubscriberInterface
{
    public static function getSubscribedEvents()
    {
        // return the subscribed events, their methods and priorities
        return array(
           KernelEvents::EXCEPTION => array(
               array('processException', 10),
               array('logException', 0),
               array('notifyException', -10),
           )
        );
    }

    public function processException(GetResponseForExceptionEvent $event)
    {
        // ...
    }

    public function logException(GetResponseForExceptionEvent $event)
    {
        // ...
    }

    public function notifyException(GetResponseForExceptionEvent $event)
    {
        // ...
    }
}
    

Now, you just need to register the class as a service and add the kernel.event_subscriber tag to tell Symfony that this is an event subscriber:

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        # app/config/services.yml
services:
    app.exception_subscriber:
        class: AppBundle\EventSubscriber\ExceptionSubscriber
        tags:
            - { name: kernel.event_subscriber }
    

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        <!-- app/config/services.xml -->
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<container xmlns="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services/services-1.0.xsd">

    <services>
        <service id="app.exception_subscriber"
            class="AppBundle\EventSubscriber\ExceptionSubscriber">

            <tag name="kernel.event_subscriber"/>
        </service>
    </services>
</container>
    

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        // app/config/services.php
$container
    ->register(
        'app.exception_subscriber',
        'AppBundle\EventSubscriber\ExceptionSubscriber'
    )
    ->addTag('kernel.event_subscriber')
;
    

Request Events, Checking Types

A single page can make several requests (one master request, and then multiple sub-requests - typically by Creating and Using Templates). For the core Symfony events, you might need to check to see if the event is for a "master" request or a "sub request":

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        // src/AppBundle/EventListener/RequestListener.php
namespace AppBundle\EventListener;

use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\Event\GetResponseEvent;
use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\HttpKernel;
use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\HttpKernelInterface;

class RequestListener
{
    public function onKernelRequest(GetResponseEvent $event)
    {
        if ($event->getRequestType() !== HttpKernelInterface::MASTER_REQUEST) {
            // don't do anything if it's not the master request
            return;
        }

        // ...
    }
}
    

Certain things, like checking information on the real request, may not need to be done on the sub-request listeners.

Listeners or Subscribers

Listeners and subscribers can be used in the same application indistinctly. The decision to use either of them is usually a matter of personal taste. However, there are some minor advantages for each of them:

Subscribers are easier to reuse because the knowledge of the events is kept in the class rather than in the service definition. This is the reason why Symfony uses subscribers internally;
Listeners are more flexible because bundles can enable or disable each of them conditionally depending on some configuration value.

This work, including the code samples, is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.

How to Create Event Listeners and Subscribers

How to Create Event Listeners and Subscribers

Creating an Event Listener

Creating an Event Subscriber

Request Events, Checking Types

Listeners or Subscribers

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