Symfony form dropdown for entries - php

Question

I am starting with coding in Symfony and I have the following problem:
Assume I have two Entities 'Client' and 'Project'. They are stored with Doctrine.
A Client has a Id, Name and an Email
A Project has a Id, client_id, name
So basically a project belongs to a Client and a Client has many projects.
My problem now:
When I'm creating a project, I want a dropdown with all possible clients. As I might be using a client drowpown somewhere else in my project I'm asking myself if there is a smart way to something like this:
class ProjectType extends AbstractType
{
public function buildForm(FormBuilderInterface $builder, array $options)
{
$builder->add('name', 'text');
$builder->add('client', new ClientListType());
}
public function configureOptions(OptionsResolver $resolver)
{
$resolver->setDefaults(array(
'data_class' => 'AppBundle\Entity\Project'
));
}
public function getName()
{
return 'project';
}
}
class ProjectController extends Controller
{
public function createAction(Request $request)
{
$project = new Project();
$options = array( ... );
$form = $this->createForm(new ProjectType(), $project, $options);
$form->handleRequest($request);
if($form->isValid()){
// persist project
return $this->redirectToRoute('show_projects');
}
return $this->render('AppBundle:Client:create.html.twig', array(
'form' => $form->createView()
));
}
}
Where ClientListType adds a select statement for all possible Clients to the form.
And $form->isValid() checks if the client (id) is valid or not.
At the moment I have the followin code in ProjectType to generate the dropdown entries:
function __construct($clients)
{
$this->clients = $clients;
}
public function buildForm(FormBuilderInterface $builder, array $options)
{
$builder->add('name', 'text');
$builder->add('client', 'choice', array(
'choices' => $this->buildChoices()
));
}
public function buildChoices()
{
$res = array();
foreach ($this->clients as $client) {
$res[$client->getId()] = $client->getName();
}
return $res;
}
But I'm assuming there is a much better way to do this, because this seems like a common problem.

Answer 1

What I would do is simply this :
public function buildForm(FormBuilderInterface $builder, array $options)
{
$builder->add('name', 'text')
->add('client', 'entity', array(
'class'=>'AppBundle\Entity\Client',
'property'=>'name'
));
}
Hope this helps.