How to design a flexible admin panel with Symfony 2 bundles?

1
votes

I want to create an admin bundle, that somehow detects other bundles and tries to add them to the menu and to the same RBAC context.

Eg:

  • AdminBundle defines a route /admin/dashboard, that requires authentication and authorization. There you can see 3 items in the menu, eg: dashboard, config (some config stored in the db), and users (CRUD for users, found in the UserBundle)
  • Then someone adds a ProductBundle, which deals with CRUD for e-commerce products or something. Somehow, without modifying any code in AdminBundle, we have now a new item 'products', available in the menu in /admin/dashboard
  • Later on, the products CRUD is no longer needed, so we just delete the ProductBundle, and it automagically disappears from the admin dashboard menu.

How would you go about implementing something like this? Is there any native support for a plugin-like design like this in symfony 2?

1
pluginssymfonyadmin

1 Answers

5
votes

I don't know about a full plugin solution but my approach would be:

There is one "master backend" call it MasterAdminBundle for the sake of conversation. This bundle contains a base.html.twig which just helps define the navigation bar of the Administration area and a {% block content %}. It also has some kind of MenuService which displays the menu. I'd have my other bundles register with this service an AdminMenu subclass by way of using the Tag System just as a Voter can register with the Security Context (see here).

In the base.html.twig I'd then likely use an Embedded Controller to render the menu.

Now with this sort of framework in place your other bundles can stay encapsulated by keeping their own admin routes and interfaces:

ProductController would now also have ProductAdminController where you can use a route prefix @Route("/admin") on the class definition. Any routes could then render templates from within the bundle since templates are held under the controller name. Acme\ProductBundle\Resources\views\ProductAdmin\edit_products.html.twig as long as they extend the base.html.twig from MasterAdminBundle and put their content into the content block.

For other things like a dashboard that you wanted to plug other bundles into I'd likely just keep going the same way, create a service in the MasterAdminBundle and use tags to load other classes into it with the data required.

Hope that makes sense, maybe others will have a better solution to this, I'm interested to hear also since this is something I'm trying to tackle at the moment also.