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03.

Routes, Controllers & Responses

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Ok, here's the scoop. Wesley Crusher - everyone's favorite ensign from Star Trek - has retired from Starfleet and is working with us to start a new business: Wesley's Star Shop. Someone's gotta break the Ferengi monopoly on the galaxy's starship repair business, and he's hired us to build the site to do that. We're about to give the Ferengi a run for their latinum!

Creating the Controller

And it starts with building our first page. The idea behind every page is always the same. Step one, give it a cool URL. That's called the route. Step two, write a PHP function that generates the page. That's known as the controller. And that page could be HTML, JSON, ASCII art, anything.

In Symfony, the controller is always a method inside a PHP class. So, we need to create our first PHP code! Where does PHP code live in our app? That's right, the src/ directory.

Inside this src/Controller/ directory, create a new file. I would normally select new "PHP class", but for this first time, create an empty file. We'll do each part by hand. Call it MainController.php, but you can name this whatever you want.

Inside, add the open PHP tag, and then say class MainController. Above this, add a namespace of App\Controller.

8 lines | src/Controller/MainController.php
// ... lines 1 - 2
namespace App\Controller;
class MainController
{
}

Namespaces & Directories

Okay, a few things about this. First, the fact that I put this class inside a directory called Controller is optional. That's just a convention. You could rename this to whatever the Klingon word for Controller is and everything would the same... and probably be more interesting!

However, there are a few rules about PHP classes in general. The first is that every class must have a namespace and that namespace needs to match your directory structure. It's always going to be App\ then whatever directory you're inside. Without going into too much detail, that's a rule you'll find in every PHP project.

The second rule is that your class name must match your filename .php. If you mess either of these up, you'll get an error from PHP that it can't find your class. The Ferengi never make this mistake.

Creating the Controller Method & Route

Anyway, our goal is to create a controller, which is a method in a class that builds the page. Add a new public function and call it homepage. But, again, the name doesn't matter. And... yea! It's not done yet, but this is our controller!

12 lines | src/Controller/MainController.php
// ... lines 1 - 4
class MainController
{
public function homepage()
{
}
}

But remember, a page is the combination of a controller and a route, which defines the page's URL. Where do we put the route? Right above the controller method using a feature of PHP called an attribute. Write #[] then start typing Route with a capital R. Check out that auto-completion!

Either option will work, but use the one from Attribute - which is newer - then hit tab. When I did that, something super important happened: my editor added a use statement at the top of the class. Anytime you use a PHP attribute, you must have a corresponding use statement for it in the same file.

These attributes work almost like PHP functions: you can pass a bunch of arguments. The first one is the path. Set this to /.

15 lines | src/Controller/MainController.php
// ... lines 1 - 4
use Symfony\Component\Routing\Attribute\Route;
class MainController
{
#[Route('/')]
public function homepage()
{
}
}

Thanks to this, when someone goes to the homepage - / - Symfony will call this controller method to build the page!

Controllers & Responses

What... should our method return? Just the HTML we want, right? Or the JSON if we're building an API?

Almost. The web works on a well-known system. First, a user requests a page. They say:

Hey, I want to see /products... or I want to see /users.json.

What we return back to them, yes, contains HTML or JSON. But it's more than that. We also communicate back a status code - which says whether the response was okay or had an error - as well as these things called headers, which communicate a bit more info, like the format of what we're returning.

This whole beautiful package is called the response. So yeah, most of the time, we'll just be thinking about returning HTML or JSON. But what we're truly sending is this bigger, nerdier thing called a response.

And so our entire job as web developers - no matter what language we're programming in - is to understand the request from the user, then create and return the response.

And this brings us back to something I love about Symfony. What does our controller return? A new Response object from Symfony! And again, PhpStorm wants to auto-complete this, suggesting a few different Response classes. We want the one from the Symfony HttpFoundation component. That's the Symfony library that contains everything related to requests & responses.

Hit tab. Once again, when we did that, PhpStorm added a use statement at the top of the file. I'm going to use this trick constantly. Anytime you reference a class name, you must have a corresponding use statement, else PHP will give you an error that it can't find the Response class.

Inside this, the first argument is the content that we want to return. Start with a hardcoded string.

16 lines | src/Controller/MainController.php
// ... lines 1 - 4
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response;
// ... lines 6 - 7
class MainController
{
#[Route('/')]
public function homepage()
{
return new Response('<strong>Starshop</strong>: your monopoly-busting option for Starship parts!');
}
}

Route, check! Controller that returns a Response, check! Let's try this. Back at the browser, this page was just a demo that shows before we have a real homepage. Now that we do, when we refresh... there it is!

I know it's not much yet, but we just learned the first fundamental part of Symfony: that every page is a route & controller... and that every controller returns a response.

Oh, and it's optional, but because our controller always returns a Response, we can add a Response return type. That doesn't change how our code works, but it makes it more descriptive to read. And if we ever did something silly and returned something other than a response, PHP would give us a clear reminder.

16 lines | src/Controller/MainController.php
// ... lines 1 - 7
class MainController
{
#[Route('/')]
public function homepage(): Response
{
return new Response('<strong>Starshop</strong>: your monopoly-busting option for Starship parts!');
}
}

Next up: to supercharge our development, let's install our first third-party package and learn about Symfony's amazing recipe system.