File uploads are difficult and the documentation unclear

[EwanValentine]

DX: I think a lot of work could be done in getting file uploads working. I'm a fairly experiences Symfony developer, and have been using it non-stop for over a year now. But one thing that has tripped me up a few times has been file uploads. It takes me ages to get working, I think it's a pretty popular part in any webapp, so there's a lot in that area I feel could be speeded up.

[jakzal]

Any suggestions how we could improve the experience? What's hard about file uploads in particular?

[EwanValentine]

Well I follow the guide in the cook books section, and it just always feels like a struggle to get working properly.

It would be awesome if it was part of the CRUD generator or something?

[jakzal]

It would be better to discuss documentation improvments in the https://github.com/symfony/symfony-docs repo. If you just have implemented file uploads, you might have valuable suggestions on how to make the docs clearer.

I'm not using the CRUD generator myself, but a better place to discuss it is the https://github.com/sensiolabs/SensioGeneratorBundle repo.

Do you think there's anything to improve in Symfony components itself? In case of this repo I think we're mainly talking about the HttpFoundation, Form and Validation components.

[xabbuh]

@EwanValentine You're right that the documentation about file uploads is one of the worst parts of the documentation. If you have any concrete ideas about what should be described, we'll be happy to get any suggestions. You can have a look at symfony/symfony-docs#2346 for the issue. You can also have a look at symfony/symfony-docs#4018 for an attempt to improve the existing cookbook article.

[weaverryan]

Certainly we need to improve the docs (they are terrible). And in doing so, this might help us identify some improvements that could potentially be made to the core. I think that would be great :).

[jakzal]

Ok, let me close this issue, since there are several issues opened in the docs repo. If there are any ideas on how to improve the code, let's open new issues with specific actions.