Symfony2 entity field type alternatives to “property” or “__toString()”?

Question

Using Symfony2 entity field type one should specify property option:

$builder->add('customers', 'entity', array(
    'multiple' => true,
    'class'    => 'AcmeHelloBundle:Customer',
    'property' => 'first',
));

But sometimes this is not sufficient: think about two customers with the same name, so display the email (unique) would be mandatory.

Another possibility is to implement __toString() into the model:

class Customer
{
    public $first, $last, $email;

    public function __toString()
    {
        return sprintf('%s %s (%s)', $this->first, $this->last, $this->email);
    }
}

The disadvances of the latter is that you are forced to display the entity the same way in all your forms.

Is there any other way to make this more flexible? I mean something like a callback function:

$builder->add('customers', 'entity', array(
    'multiple' => true,
    'class'    => 'AcmeHelloBundle:Customer',
    'property' => function($data) {
         return sprintf('%s %s (%s)', $data->first, $data->last, $data->email);
     },
));

Answer 1

I found this really helpful, and I wound a really easy way to do this with your code so here is the solution

$builder->add('customers', 'entity', array(
'multiple' => true,
'class'    => 'AcmeHelloBundle:Customer',
'property' => 'label',
));

And in the class Customer (the Entity)

public function getLabel()
{
    return $this->lastname .', '. $this->firstname .' ('. $this->email .')';
}

eh voila :D the property get its String from the Entity not the Database.

Answer 2

Passing a closure does not work yet, but will be added to Symfony soon: https://github.com/symfony/symfony/issues/4067

Answer 3

It seems this can be achievable by adding following block after elseif ($this->labelPath) block in ObjectChoiceList.php.

elseif (is_callable($this->labelPath)) {
  $labels[$i] = call_user_func($this->labelPath, $choice);
}

Haven't tried it though :).