Symfony Validation Groups

Symfony Validation Groups – In Symfony, normally we can validate user submitted values against our entities through these ways – Annotation, Yaml, PHP etc. Example validation.yml for product entity

Webkul\DemoBundle\Entity\Product:
    properties:
        name:
            - NotBlank: { message: "product.name.not_blank" }   
            - Length:
                max: 50
                maxMessage: "product.name.length"
        description:
            - Length:
                max: 200
                maxMessage: "product.description.length"

But when a from or entity used more than one places to create form like Product in any e-commerce

• At time of product add you would never validate product id because it isn’t created yet.
• But at time of edit product, you do.

Then how is form/ entity going to tell Symfony that we need to validate id or not in current request ? For this we use Validation Groups . We declare validation groups in our from and with properties declared in validation.yml.

Controller (It will be array)

$form = $this->createForm(new Product(), $product , array(
                                    'validation_groups' => array('productEdit')
                                   )
                                 );

Yaml (Let’s say you added one validation group for product create form – “product”)

Webkul\DemoBundle\Entity\Product:
    properties:
        productId: 
            - NotBlank: { groups: [productEdit] }
        name:
            - NotBlank: { groups: [product, productEdit] }   
            - Length:
                max: 50
                maxMessage: "product.name.length"
                groups: [product, productEdit]
        description:
            - Length:
                max: 200
                maxMessage: "product.description.length"
                groups: [product, productEdit]

Now productId validation is enabled only for Product Edit form.

Framework used – Symfony 2.7, Official Doc