Skip to content
  • About
    • What is Symfony?
    • Community
    • News
    • Contributing
    • Support
  • Documentation
    • Symfony Docs
    • Symfony Book
    • Screencasts
    • Symfony Bundles
    • Symfony Cloud
    • Training
  • Services
    • Platform.sh for Symfony Best platform to deploy Symfony apps
    • SymfonyInsight Automatic quality checks for your apps
    • Symfony Certification Prove your knowledge and boost your career
    • SensioLabs Professional services to help you with Symfony
    • Blackfire Profile and monitor performance of your apps
  • Other
  • Blog
  • Download
sponsored by SensioLabs
  1. Home
  2. Documentation
  3. Templating
  4. How to Embed Controllers in a Template
  • Documentation
  • Book
  • Reference
  • Bundles
  • Cloud

How to Embed Controllers in a Template

Edit this page

Warning: You are browsing the documentation for Symfony 4.0, which is no longer maintained.

Read the updated version of this page for Symfony 6.3 (the current stable version).

How to Embed Controllers in a Template

Note

Rendering embedded controllers is "heavier" than including a template or calling a custom Twig function. Unless you're planning on caching the fragment, avoid embedding many controllers.

Including template fragments is useful to reuse the same content on several pages. However, this technique is not the best solution in some cases.

Consider a website that displays on its sidebar the most recently published articles. This list of articles is dynamic and it's probably the result of a database query. In other words, the controller of any page that displays that sidebar must make the same database query and pass the list of articles to the included template fragment.

The alternative solution proposed by Symfony is to create a controller that only displays the list of recent articles and then call to that controller from any template that needs to display that content.

First, create a controller that renders a certain number of recent articles:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
// src/Controller/ArticleController.php
namespace App\Controller;

// ...

class ArticleController extends Controller
{
    public function recentArticles($max = 3)
    {
        // make a database call or other logic
        // to get the "$max" most recent articles
        $articles = ...;

        return $this->render(
            'article/recent_list.html.twig',
            array('articles' => $articles)
        );
    }
}

Then, create a recent_list template fragment to list the articles given by the controller:

1
2
3
4
5
6
{# templates/article/recent_list.html.twig #}
{% for article in articles %}
    <a href="{{ path('article_show', {slug: article.slug}) }}">
        {{ article.title }}
    </a>
{% endfor %}

Note

Notice that the article URL is hardcoded in this example (e.g. /article/*slug*). This is a bad practice. In the next section, you'll learn how to do this correctly.

To include the controller, you'll need to refer to it using the standard string syntax for controllers (i.e. controllerNamespace::action):

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
{# templates/base.html.twig #}

{# ... #}
<div id="sidebar">
    {{ render(controller(
        'App\\Controller\\ArticleController::recentArticles',
        { 'max': 3 }
    )) }}
</div>
This work, including the code samples, is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.
TOC
    Version
    We stand with Ukraine.
    Version:
    Check Code Performance in Dev, Test, Staging & Production

    Check Code Performance in Dev, Test, Staging & Production

    Peruse our complete Symfony & PHP solutions catalog for your web development needs.

    Peruse our complete Symfony & PHP solutions catalog for your web development needs.

    Symfony footer

    ↓ Our footer now uses the colors of the Ukrainian flag because Symfony stands with the people of Ukraine.

    Avatar of Souhail, a Symfony contributor

    Thanks Souhail (@souhail_5) for being a Symfony contributor

    2 commits • 6 lines changed

    View all contributors that help us make Symfony

    Become a Symfony contributor

    Be an active part of the community and contribute ideas, code and bug fixes. Both experts and newcomers are welcome.

    Learn how to contribute

    Symfony™ is a trademark of Symfony SAS. All rights reserved.

    • What is Symfony?

      • Symfony at a Glance
      • Symfony Components
      • Case Studies
      • Symfony Releases
      • Security Policy
      • Logo & Screenshots
      • Trademark & Licenses
      • symfony1 Legacy
    • Learn Symfony

      • Symfony Docs
      • Symfony Book
      • Reference
      • Bundles
      • Best Practices
      • Training
      • eLearning Platform
      • Certification
    • Screencasts

      • Learn Symfony
      • Learn PHP
      • Learn JavaScript
      • Learn Drupal
      • Learn RESTful APIs
    • Community

      • SymfonyConnect
      • Support
      • How to be Involved
      • Code of Conduct
      • Events & Meetups
      • Projects using Symfony
      • Downloads Stats
      • Contributors
      • Backers
    • Blog

      • Events & Meetups
      • A week of symfony
      • Case studies
      • Cloud
      • Community
      • Conferences
      • Diversity
      • Documentation
      • Living on the edge
      • Releases
      • Security Advisories
      • SymfonyInsight
      • Twig
      • SensioLabs
    • Services

      • SensioLabs services
      • Train developers
      • Manage your project quality
      • Improve your project performance
      • Host Symfony projects

      Deployed on

    Follow Symfony

    Search by Meilisearch