Multiple entities in one form [Symfony 3] - php

Question

Here are my tables:
Movie
id
name
year
description
Person
id
name
date_of_birth
Role
id
name
movie_id
person_id
So, Movie should contain, obviously, movies. Person consists of people (actors, directors or writers). Table Role connects with other 2 tables by having $movie and $person variable inside its class, with Many-to-One relationship for both of them, which in the end results in movie_id & person_id.
What I want to achieve is having a form, where I will be able to insert new movie, but also its relevant actors, director(s) & writer(s).
Final form result should contain these fields:
movie_name, movie_year, movie_description
dropdown with list of persons from DB (person.name)
dropdown with 3 possibilities - actor, director, writer (which would eventually be inserted to DB)
So, after filling out the first three inputs, user chooses a person from a dropdown list, and then, chooses appropriate role for chosen person. If I'm thinking right, I should be able to SELECT from Person (name) table , and to INSERT into Movie (name, year, descr.) & Role (name, movie_id, person_id) tables.
I'm aware that I should be using Form collections, but I don't understand how to use them, at least in this situation. I guess I should start by creating something like RoleModel class, but not sure whether I made a mistake before going into this, which makes this problem more complex than it should be.
My questions really is - how to make this work with Form collections?
I can provide any necessary code, if needed.

Answer 1

Symfony make it really easy, so first, you need to add bidirectional relation (One-to-many) between your person entity and your movie entity so you need to:
Add property called person to your movie entity:
Code:
/**
* #ORM\ManyToOne(targetEntity="AppBundle\Entity\Person", inversedBy="movies")
*/
protected $person;
Add property called movies to your person entity:
Code:
/**
* #ORM\OneToMany(targetEntity="AppBundle\Entity\Movie", mappedBy="person")
*/
protected $movies;
Now in your MovieType file (form configuration file) you can do it by:
public function buildForm(FormBuilderInterface $builder, array $options)
{
$builder
->add('name')
->add('year')
->add('description', TextareaType::class)
->add('person', EntityType::class, array(
'class' => Person::class, //This existed usually in (AppBundle\Entity\Person)
'choice_label' => 'name'
));
}
This is a simple demonstration on how to use EntityType in Symfony.
Good luck.

Answer 2

You can solve this by embedding FormTypes, you can create a new one which is a composition of a PersonFormType and MovieFormType, and it would need an extra field for the role type (director, actor, etc)
Then, after submit, you can retrieve your objects something like this:
// SomeController's action
...
$data = $form->getData();
$person = $data['person'] // or whatever is the name of the field
You can find more information about embedding FormTypes in the docs: https://symfony.com/doc/cur...