Cover of the book Symfony 5: The Fast Track

Symfony 5: The Fast Track is the best book to learn modern Symfony development, from zero to production. +300 pages showcasing Symfony with Docker, APIs, queues & async tasks, Webpack, SPAs, etc.

  1. Home
  2. Documentation
  3. Bundles
  4. SonataAdminBundle
  5. 5. Dashboard
WARNING: You are browsing the documentation for version 2.x which is not maintained anymore. If some of your projects are still using this version, consider upgrading.

5. Dashboard

2.x version
Maintained
3.x current 4.x
Unmaintained
2.x

5. Dashboard

The Dashboard is the main landing page. By default it lists your mapped models, as defined by your Admin services. This is useful to help you start using SonataAdminBundle right away, but there is much more that you can do to take advantage of the Dashboard.

The Dashboard is, by default, available at /admin/dashboard, which is handled by the SonataAdminBundle:Core:dashboard controller action. The default view file for this action is SonataAdminBundle:Core:dashboard.html.twig, but you can change this in your config.yml:

  • YAML
    1
2
3
4
    # app/config/config.yml
sonata_admin:
    templates:
        dashboard: SonataAdminBundle:Core:dashboard.html.twig

Note

This view, like most of the SonataAdminBundle views, extends a global template file, which also contains significant parts to the page. More information about this is available in the Templates chapter.

5.1. Blocks

The Dashboard is actually built using Blocks from SonataBlockBundle. You can learn more about this bundle and how to build your own Blocks on the SonataBlock documentation page.

5.2. The Admin list

The Admin list is a Block that fetches information from the Admin service’s Pool and prints it in the nicely formated list you have on your default Dashboard. The Admin list is defined by the sonata.admin.block.admin_list service, which is implemented by the Block\AdminListBlockService class. It is then rendered using the SonataAdminBundle:Block:block_admin_list.html.twig template file.

Feel free to take a look at these files. You’ll find the code rather short and easy to understand, and it will be a great help when implementing your own blocks.

5.3. Configuring the Admin list

As you probably noticed by now, the Admin list groups Admin mappings together. There are several ways in which you can configure these groups.

5.3.1. Using the Admin service declaration

The first, and most commonly used, method is to set a group when defining your Admin services:

  • XML
    1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
    <service id="sonata.admin.post" class="Acme\DemoBundle\Admin\PostAdmin">
      <tag name="sonata.admin" manager_type="orm"
          group="Content"
          label="Post"/>
      <argument />
      <argument>Acme\DemoBundle\Entity\Post</argument>
      <argument />
  </service>
  • YAML
     1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
    services:
    sonata.admin.post:
        class: Acme\DemoBundle\Admin\PostAdmin
        tags:
            - name: sonata.admin
              manager_type: orm
              group: "Content"
              label: "Post"
        arguments:
            - ~
            - Acme\DemoBundle\Entity\Post
            - ~

In these examples, notice the group tag, stating that this particular Admin service belongs to the Content group.

  • XML
    1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
    <service id="sonata.admin.post" class="Acme\DemoBundle\Admin\PostAdmin">
      <tag name="sonata.admin" manager_type="orm"
          group="acme.admin.group.content"
          label="acme.admin.model.post" label_catalogue="AcmeDemoBundle"/>
      <argument />
      <argument>Acme\DemoBundle\Entity\Post</argument>
      <argument />
  </service>
  • YAML
     1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
    services:
    sonata.admin.post:
        class: Acme\DemoBundle\Admin\PostAdmin
        tags:
            - name: sonata.admin
              manager_type: orm
              group: "acme.admin.group.content"
              label: "acme.admin.model.post"
              label_catalogue: "AcmeDemoBundle"
        arguments:
            - ~
            - Acme\DemoBundle\Entity\Post
            - ~

In this example, the labels are translated by SonataAdminBundle, using the given label_catalogue. So, you can use the above examples to support multiple languages in your project.

Note

You can use parameters (e.g. %acme_admin.group_post%) for the group names in either scenario.

5.3.2. Using the config.yml

You can also configure the Admin list in your config.yml file. This configuration method overrides any settings defined in the Admin service declarations.

  • YAML
     1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
    # app/config/config.yml
sonata_admin:
    dashboard:
        groups:
            acme.admin.group.content:
                label: acme.admin.group.content
                label_catalogue: AcmeDemoBundle
                items:
                    - sonata.admin.post
            acme.admin.group.blog:
                items: ~
                item_adds:
                    - sonata.admin.page
                roles: [ ROLE_ONE, ROLE_TWO ]
            acme.admin.group.misc: ~

Note

This is an academic, full configuration, example. In real cases, you will usually not need to use all the displayed options. To use a default value for any setting either leave out that key or use the ~ value for that option.

This configuration specifies that the acme.admin.group.content group uses the acme.admin.group.content label, which is translated using the AcmeDemoBundle translation catalogue (the same label and translation configuration that we declared previously, in the service definition example).

It also states that the acme.admin.group.content group contains just the sonata.admin.post Admin mapping, meaning that any other Admin services declared as belonging to this group will not be displayed here.

Secondly, we declare a acme.admin.group.blog group as having all its default items (i.e. the ones specified in the Admin service declarations), plus an additional sonata.admin.page mapping, that was not initially part of this group.

We also use the roles option here, which means that only users with the ROLE_ONE or ROLE_TWO privileges will be able to see this group, as opposed to the default setting which allows everyone to see a given group. Users with ROLE_SUPER_ADMIN are always able to see groups that would otherwise be hidden by this configuration option.

The third group, acme.admin.group.misc, is set up as a group which uses all its default values, as declared in the service declarations.

5.4. Adding more Blocks

Like we said before, the Dashboard comes with a default Admin list block, but you can create and add more blocks to it.

Dashboard

In this screenshot, in addition to the default Admin list block on the left, we added a text block and RSS feed block on the right. The configuration for this scenario would be:

  • YAML
     1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
    # app/config/config.yml
sonata_admin:
    dashboard:
        blocks:
            -
                position: left
                type: sonata.admin.block.admin_list
            -
                position: right
                type: sonata.block.service.text
                settings:
                    content: >
                        <h2>Welcome to the Sonata Admin</h2>
                        <p>This is a <code>sonata.block.service.text</code> from the Block
                        Bundle, you can create and add new block in these area by configuring
                        the <code>sonata_admin</code> section.</p> <br /> For instance, here
                        a RSS feed parser (<code>sonata.block.service.rss</code>):
            -
                position: right
                type: sonata.block.service.rss
                settings:
                    title: Sonata Project's Feeds
                    url: http://sonata-project.org/blog/archive.rss

Note

Blocks may accept/require additional settings to be passed in order to work properly. Refer to the associated documentation/implementation to get more information on each block’s options and requirements.

5.4.1. Display two Admin list blocks with different dashboard groups

The same block can have multiple instances, and be displayed multiple times across the Dashboard using different configuration settings for each instance. A particular example is the Admin list block, which can be configured to suit this scenario.

  • YAML
     1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
    # app/config/config.yml
sonata_admin:
    dashboard:
        blocks:
            # display two dashboard blocks
            -
                position: left
                type: sonata.admin.block.admin_list
                settings:
                    groups: [sonata_page1, sonata_page2]
            -
                position: right
                type: sonata.admin.block.admin_list
                settings:
                    groups: [sonata_page3]

        groups:
            sonata_page1:
                items:
                    - sonata.page.admin.myitem1
            sonata_page2:
                items:
                    - sonata.page.admin.myitem2
                    - sonata.page.admin.myitem3
            sonata_page3:
                items:
                    - sonata.page.admin.myitem4

In this example, you would have two admin_list blocks on your dashboard, each of them containing just the respectively configured groups.

5.4.1.1. Dashboard Layout

Supported positions right now are the following:

  • top
  • left
  • center
  • right
  • bottom

The layout is as follows:

Top
Left Center Right
Bottom

On top and bottom positions, you can also specify an optionnal class option to set the width of the block.

  • YAML
    1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
    # app/config/config.yml
sonata_admin:
    dashboard:
        blocks:
            # display one dashboard block in the top zone with a col-md-6 HTML class
            -
                position: top
                class: col-md-6
                type: sonata.admin.block.admin_list

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