Symfony News

New in Symfony 5.2: Form field helpers

Titouan Galopin

Contributed by
Titouan Galopin
in #38307.

Symfony Forms helps you create and process HTML forms by abstracting all the hard and repetitive stuff. It also provides many utilities to render form contents, from the render-all {{ form(form) }} instruction to the individual form helpers:

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{{ form_start(form) }}
    <div class="my-custom-class-for-errors">
        {{ form_errors(form) }}
    </div>

    <div class="form-control">
        <i class="fa fa-calendar"></i> {{ form_label(form.dueDate) }}
        {{ form_widget(form.dueDate) }}

        <small>{{ form_help(form.dueDate) }}</small>

        <div class="form-error">
            {{ form_errors(form.dueDate) }}
        </div>
    </div>
{{ form_end(form) }}

The form_*() helpers render each part of the form field, including all its needed HTML elements. Most developers like this behavior, but some designers struggle with it, because it hides all the HTML in form themes which are not easy to manage by them.

That’s why Symfony 5.2 introduces new Twig form helpers to render the value of each form field part without adding any HTML around it:

  • field_name
  • field_value
  • field_label
  • field_help
  • field_errors
  • field_choices (an iterator of the field choices; e.g. for <select>)

When using these helpers, you must write all the HTML contents for all form fields, which some people prefer to better control the generated HTML without having to deal with form themes:

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<input
    name="{{ field_name(form.username) }}"
    value="{{ field_value(form.username) }}"
    placeholder="{{ field_label(form.username) }}"
    class="form-control"
/>

<select name="{{ field_name(form.country) }}" class="form-control">
    <option value="">{{ field_label(form.country) }}</option>

    {% for label, value in field_choices(form.country) %}
        <option value="{{ value }}">{{ label }}</option>
    {% endfor %}
</select>

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