Best practices for validating Entity properties in Symfony 2

Question

symfony

In the process of studying Symfony 2, the question arose of how best to organize the validation of elements of Doctrine entities. For example, I have an entity User, it has an $email property and I want to be sure that this property is a valid email.

class User 
{
  /**
   * @var string
   * @ORM\Column(type="string")
   */
  protected $email;

  /**
   * @return string
   */
  public function getEmail() 
  {
     return $this->email;
  }

  /**
   * @param string $email
   * @return $this
   */ 
  public function setEmail($email) 
  {
    // Вот здесь по-идее должен быть код проверки
    $this->email = $email;
    return $this;
  }

}

Previously, when using Doctrine in conjunction with ZF1, I simply used the appropriate validator in the setter method and threw an exception in case of an incorrect value. However, in Symfony, I can't get the DI container from the entity, and therefore can't get the validator service correctly. One could try using the validator classes directly, but they don't seem to be designed for that.

Alternatively, as I understand it, you can use @Assert\xxxxannotations and validate from the outside, but at first glance the method does not look quite suitable, or is it just that?

Reading the documentation and searching Google did not give a definite answer, so I ask for the help of the respected habra community: how is Symfony supposed to solve the problem of validating the properties of Entity classes? Explanations, links to articles and/or code samples for further study would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You should start with this tutorial: symfony.com/doc/current/book/validation.html The
comment above described another validation option. Everything here is for an amateur: I didn’t like the annotations and I write all the configs in yml, including the validator.
So far, it is impossible to answer your question more specifically, because there is no question. The manual contains all the cases that may be useful to you at the first stage, if you have questions - ask in this thread, I will try to answer

Answer 2

> However in Symfony I can't get DI container from entity
Yes. Validation is carried out externally. In service. Not within the entity.
Validation rules are set in Resources/config/validation.yml

Answer 3

However, it is quite logical to hide the methods for checking the properties of an object in the object itself and carry out the verification using the appropriate method. I like to use such a pattern for this,
there is a property, say referalUserId
The class object is correct, if we say this very referalUserId is contained / not contained in any table of some database - we do all the checks in the class method
public function isReferalUserIdLegal(){
// our validation code
return true/false depending on the results of the check
}
and in the validator.yml we point to the check class and method
# src/Acme/MyBundle/Resources/config/validation.yml
Acme\MyBundle\Entity\Myclass:
getters:
ReferralUserIdLegal:
- "True": { message: "Referral can only be very referral!" }
Voila