Dynamic templates and controllers

Now that we have a few records in our table, let's see how to fetch them via controller and feed their properties to our templates. What we expect from our dynamic template is to receive an object and show its properties. In our case, the object is User and its properties are name, bio, and email. So, edit the about/index.html.twig template as follows:

{# mava/app/Resources/views/about/index.html.twig #}

{% if user %}
  <h1>User Profile</h1>
  <strong>Name: </strong>{{user.name}} <br/>
  <strong>email: </strong>{{user.email}} <br/>
  <strong>Bio: </strong>{{user.bio}} <br/>
{% else %}
  mava is a web app for task management and team collaboration. <br/>
{% endif %}

Next, add a few lines to aboutAction() to retrieve information about the given user:

<?php
// AppBundle/Controller/DefaultController.php
// …
use AppBundle\Entity\User;
// ...
  /**
   * @Route("/about/{name}", name="aboutpage", defaults={"name":null})
   */
  public function aboutAction($name)
  {
    if ($name) {
      $user = $this->getDoctrine()
      ->getRepository('AppBundle:User')
      ->findOneBy(array('name'=>$name));
      if (false === $user instanceof User) {
        throw $this->createNotFoundException(
          'No user named '.$name.' found!'
        );
      }
    }
    return $this->render('about/index.html.twig', array('user' => $user));
  }

This action first accesses the Doctrine service, and, via this, approaches the User entity. The next step would be to find the first record that has a john value for its name property.

If no record is found, an exception will be thrown; otherwise, the found object will be passed to the index.html.twig template.

That's it. If you visit the http://localhost:8000/about/john or http://localhost:8000/about/jack URL, you will see that it works as we expected: