How to Make Service Arguments/References Optional
Edit this pageWarning: You are browsing the documentation for Symfony 4.1, which is no longer maintained.
Read the updated version of this page for Symfony 6.0 (the current stable version).
How to Make Service Arguments/References Optional
Sometimes, one of your services may have an optional dependency, meaning that the dependency is not required for your service to work properly. You can configure the container to not throw an error in this case.
Setting Missing Dependencies to null
You can use the null strategy to explicitly set the argument to null
if the service does not exist:
- XML
- PHP
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
<!-- 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\Newsletter\NewsletterManager">
<argument type="service" id="logger" on-invalid="null" />
</service>
</services>
</container>Note
The "null" strategy is not currently supported by the YAML driver.
Ignoring Missing Dependencies
The behavior of ignoring missing dependencies is the same as the "null" behavior except when used within a method call, in which case the method call itself will be removed.
In the following example the container will inject a service using a method call if the service exists and remove the method call if it does not:
- YAML
- XML
- PHP
1 2 3 4 5
# config/services.yaml
services:
App\Newsletter\NewsletterManager:
calls:
- [setLogger, ['@?logger']]Note
If the argument to the method call is a collection of arguments and any of them is missing, those elements are removed but the method call is still made with the remaining elements of the collection.
In YAML, the special @? syntax tells the service container that the dependency
is optional. The NewsletterManager must also be rewritten by
adding a setLogger() method:
1 2 3 4
public function setLogger(LoggerInterface $logger)
{
// ...
}
