[Form][2.8] Type "entity" not setting selected data when choice_value is a string attribute

[Rasanga]

I have the following code:

$builder->add('category', 'entity', [
                'required'      => false,
                'class'         => 'Ras\Bundle\DomainBundle\Entity\Category',
                'choice_value'  => 'name',
                'choice_label'  => 'label'
            ]);

When I select a category it does not give me the selected category entity, but when I changed choice_value to be id it worked fine. There seem to be an issue when the choice_value is a string attribute

NOTE:
Ras\Bundle\DomainBundle\Entity\Category entity has following attributes: id, name, label

[xabbuh]

Why do you want to change the choice_value property to name? Since the name property is apparently not the identifier of your Category entity, the entity type will not be able to find an entry for the submitted values.

[Rasanga]

thank you for the quick response 👍

I thought it should be able to find entries by given choice_value field. can we add this as a feature I can make a PR?

[xabbuh]

What is the advantage of that instead of just using the id?

[Rasanga]

When you use GET method to send form data it would great have to have URL query parameters in human readable manner

For example example.com/search?category=php is better than example.com/search?category=2

See the difference?

[xabbuh]

I understand your use case, but I do not think that a choice or entity type is what you should use for that imo.

[Tobion]

The entity tyoe is using the primary key to look up the doctrine entity which of course won't find it with name. You can use a custom query builder for that.

[Rasanga]

I used a query builder as follows but I had no luck:

$builder->add('category', 'entity', [
                'required'      => false,
                'class'         => 'Ras\Bundle\DomainBundle\Entity\Category',
                'choice_value'  => 'name',
                'choice_label'  => 'label',
                'query_builder' => function (CategoryRepository $repository) {
                    return $repository->createQueryBuilder('c')
                        ->addSelect('c.name')
                        ->addSelect('c.label')
                        ->groupBy('c.name')
                    ;
            ]);

[HeahDude]

This issue should be reopened until #17694 is merged. This is a bug of EntityType not handling choice_value.

[xabbuh]

Well, we can keep it closed as we already keep track of that bug in #13964 and #17693.

[igorpaladino]

Having this feature working would be a nice thing. I was dealing with the same issue. Meanwhile, a workaround solution would be using Data View Transformers http://symfony.com/doc/current/cookbook/form/data_transformers.html

[HeahDude]

@igorpaladino it fixed by #17694 and #17990 as of 2.7.11, 2.8.4 and 3.0.4. Note that using a custom choice_value will prevent an optimization of the loader, loading all the entities on submission instead of the submitted values only.