How to filter entities displayed in Symfony2 form collection

Question

Is there a way to filter the entities collected by Symfony2 in a form collection?

My scenario is this;

2 entities: parent and child. The child entity has a property 'birthdate'. There is a manyToMany relationship between the 2 tables.

I have a formType (parentType) that contains a collection of childType forms.

I can load parentType and it loads every childType that is associated to the parent record.

I want to filter the childType collection so that records with a birthdate greater than a date are included and those less than the date are excluded.

The Symfony2 collection form type does not allow the use of 'query_builder' to filter the selection in builder->add().

Has anyone faced or solved this problem?

Mikhail Prosalov Mikhail Prosalov · Accepted Answer · 2015-07-14T16:21:22

My solution is to use separate setter/getter for child entity collection and filter getter output with Criteria. Form field name should be "filteredChilds". A bit hacky but should do the trick.

Entity/Parent.php

<?php

...

use Doctrine\Common\Collections\Criteria;

...

class Parent
{

    ...

    /**
     * @param Child $child
     * @return $this
     */
    public function addChild(Child $child)
    {
        $this->childs[] = $child;

        return $this;
    }

    /**
     * @param Child $child
     */
    public function removeChild(Child $child)
    {
        $this->childs->removeElement($child);
    }

    /**
     * @return ArrayCollection
     */
    public function getChilds()
    {
        return $this->childs;
    }

    /**
     * @param Child $child
     * @return $this
     */
    public function addFilteredChild(Child $child)
    {
        $this->addChild($child);
    }

    /**
     * @param Child $child
     */
    public function removeFilteredChild(Child $child)
    {
        $this->removeChild($child);
    }

    /**
     * @return ArrayCollection
     */
    public function getFilteredChilds()
    {
        $criteria = Criteria::create()
            ->where(Criteria::expr()->gt("birthday", new \DateTime()));

        return $this->getChilds()->matching($criteria);
    }

    ...

}

How to filter entities displayed in Symfony2 form collection

1 Answers