How to change entities without forms?

Question

symfony

I'm trying to implement changing entities. The controller looks like this:

/**
     * @param Product $slug
     * @param Product $updatedProduct
     * @return Product
     *
     * @Rest\Route(requirements={"slug" = "\d+"})
     * @ParamConverter(
     *      name="updatedProduct",
     *      converter="fos_rest.request_body",
     *      class="FiveToFive\ergil\DomainBundle\Entity\Product"
     * )
     * @Rest\View(serializerGroups={ "Default", "product_details", "product_categories_list", "image_details" })
     */
    public function putAction(Product $slug, Product $updatedProduct)
    {
        $productService = $this->get("product.service");
        return $productService->update($updatedProduct);
    }

If an id is passed in the request body, then slug and updatedProduct are the same entity, the title is updated, the rest of the fields are old ... profit:

// PUT http://my-api-uyl/api/products/1
{
    "id": 1,
    "title": "Updated some sort of macgick"
}

But it looks very ugly! If you remove "id" in the request body, then it turns out that slug is an entity from the database, and updatedProduct is a new entity, in which all fields except title are null and how to combine it with slug is extremely unclear.
Is there any way to merge two entities into one?
Or is it possible to somehow force the param converter to take the id from the request url?
The following option doesn't work:

@ParamConverter(
      name="updatedProduct",
      converter="fos_rest.request_body",
      class="FiveToFive\ergil\DomainBundle\Entity\Product",
      options= { "id" = "slug" }
)

I use FOSRestBundle, JMSSerializerBundle

Answer 1

The correct way is to not use entities in controllers at all, and never feed them to JMS Serializers or forms.
A more or less correct way is to define your own Object Constructor for the JMS Serializer to make it possible to specify which object to shove data into.

Answer 2

If you remove "id" in the request body

...then the PUT method should create the resource. Therefore, we return the result of the postAction method

public function putAction(Product $slug, Product $updatedProduct)
{
    if (!$updatedProduct->getId()) {
        return $this->postAction(/* $slug | $updatedProduct */);
    }
    
    return $this->get('product.service')->update($updatedProduct);
}