POST handling of AngularJs requests in symfony2

Using Symfony2 and AngularJs in tandem is a good idea, but there is one problem - solving out of the box has a problem in communication. This post will show you how to automatically decode JSON requests and use the received data using Request Symfony using the symfony-json-request-transformer library (in fact, only one class).

Idea

The $ http AngularJs service automatically sends the data with the Content-Type: application/json header in the POST request, and Symfony in turn expects application/x-www-form-urlencoded .

For example, let's send a simple JSON object from our angular application:

 { "name": "John" } 

Now in the controller we get this data:

 public function postAction(Request $request) { $data = json_decode($request->getContent(), true); echo $data['name']; // John } 

Pretty simple, right? But, unfortunately, we cannot use the ParameterBag interface in the Request object in this case.
If name optional and has a default value, I would like to receive data like this:

 $name = $request->request->get('name', 'Ivan'); 

Fortunately, using the replace method we can replace the data in the ParameterBag with our decoded JSON.

 public function postAction(Request $request) { $data = json_decode($request->getContent(), true); $request->request->replace($data); echo $request->request->get('name', 'Ivan'); // John } 

Great, works the way we wanted. But this is only one controller ...
')

Implementation

But copying the code to each controller violates the DRY principle, making the code wet ( an acronym word DRY and WET ). What if I say that you can handle every JSON request without worrying about it at all? Using an event handler labeled kernel.event_listener , it:

1. Check for a request for a Content-Type: application/json header
2. If so, decodes it.
3. Fill the Request::$request object
4. It returns an HTTP 400 Bad Request error code if something went wrong.

You can see the full code on Github .

Registering an event handler is very simple, just by defining a new service:

 <service id="kernel.event_listener.json_request_transformer" class="Qandidate\Common\Symfony\HttpKernel\EventListener\JsonRequestTransformerListener"> <tag name="kernel.event_listener" event="kernel.request" method="onKernelRequest" priority="100" /> </service> 

Exit through the souvenir shop

To show the code in action, a demo application was created, its code is also on Github . That's all, thank you for your attention.