Wieni Controller

Adds support for bundle-specific controllers for Drupal 8 entities.

Why?

• Improve the developer experience of the Entity API by providing the ability to render entities of different bundles in different ways.
• A new way of building layouts: gather your data in the controller and use it to render a Twig template. Inspired by Laravel and other MVC frameworks. Completely optional.

Installation

This package requires PHP 7.1 and Drupal 8 or higher. It can be installed using Composer:

 composer require wieni/wmcontroller

You should also include the patch from #2638686 if you're getting early rendering errors in your controllers.

Configuration

Before you get started, make sure the theme or module that will hold your templates is configured to do so. Check the wmtwig documentation for more info.

Configuration is stored as service parameters. You can override these in a service YAML file defined in $settings['container_yamls'] or in the services.yml file of a (custom) module.

parameters:
    wmcontroller.settings:
        # The controller responsible for forwarding to bundle-specific controllers.
        # Only override this if you know what you're doing.
        frontcontroller: 'Drupal\wmcontroller\Controller\FrontController'

        # Throw a 404 NotFoundHttpException when an entity is not translated
        # in the current language. ( /en/node/123 gives 404 if node/123 has no
        # en translation )
        404_when_not_translated: true

        # Routes to never reroute through the front controller
        ignore_routes: []

How does it work?

Creating controllers

• Create bundle-specific controllers by creating new classes with the following naming convention:

  src\Controller\<entityType>\<bundle>Controller

  (<entityType> and <bundle> are singular and camelCased)

  For example: src\Controller\TaxonomyTerm\CategoryController will be matched against a taxonomy_term with bundle category.

• This module will always call the show method on the controller class.

• A ControllerBase class including ViewBuilderTrait, MainEntityTrait and RedirectBuilderTrait is provided, but extending this class is not required.

Example

// src/Controller/Node/ArticleController.php
<?php

namespace Drupal\mymodule\Controller\Node;

use Drupal\Core\Controller\ControllerBase;
use Drupal\node\NodeInterface;

class ArticleController extends ControllerBase
{
    public function show(NodeInterface $node)
    {
        return [
            '#theme' => 'article_node',
            '#node' => $node,
        ];
    }
}

Rendering Twig templates

Using the ViewBuilder class, you can easily render Twig templates without having to mess with render arrays.

This module automatically resolves view builders to render arrays, so it's safe to return instances of this class in controllers.

The easiest way of building views is using the view method included in ControllerBase and ViewBuilderTrait. Just pass the template name, any parameters and you're good to go.

The template name is the path to the template file, but with dots as path separators and without the file extension. Note that you can only use templates in the configured theme and path.

Example

// src/Controller/Node/ArticleController.php
<?php

namespace Drupal\mymodule\Controller\Node;

use Drupal\Core\Controller\ControllerBase;
use Drupal\mymodule\Entity\Node\Article; # See wieni/wmmodel

class ArticleController extends ControllerBase
{
    public function show(Article $article)
    {
        // Loads mytheme/templates/article/detail.html.twig
        return $this->view(
            'article.detail',
            [
                'article' => $article,
            ]
        );
    }
}

Accessing the main entity

It's often useful to access the main entity of the current request, e.g. on canonical or edit routes. It has always been possible to access this entity by extracting it from the route parameters of the current route match, but the MainEntity service makes that easier.

Apart from having easier access to the entity, it's also possible to manually set the main entity of custom routes using the MainEntityTrait or the wmcontroller.main_entity service directly.

If the wmpage_cache module is installed, this main entity is also used to determine cachability metadata of the current request.

Changelog

All notable changes to this project will be documented in the CHANGELOG file.

Security

If you discover any security-related issues, please email security@wieni.be instead of using the issue tracker.

License

Distributed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for more information.