Concatenate object property with string in hautelook/AliceBundle

Question

I'm using Alice in a Symfony 2 bundle to load fixtures. I'm trying to customize the name of an entity using the name of a parent entity. Specifically, I have an entity, @Report1, whose @Report1->name property returns Test Report 1.

I'm trying to create a child entity with the name Test Report 1 Scenario 1. Here's my fixture file snippet:

AppBundle\Entity\Scenario:
  Scenario1:
    report_id: @Report1->id
    name: @Report1->name 'Scenario 1'

All I get back is the literal @Report1->name 'Scenario 1'.

If I remove the 'Scenario 1' string from thename: property, I get the parent report's actual name.

Answer 1

I am using hautelook/alice-bundle 1.3.1 (nelmio/alice 2.2.0 and fzaninotto/faker 1.6.0) with php 5.6.

You can configure a custom data provider with a variable-length arguments list and use it in your fixtures files.

In AppBundle/DataFixtures/ORM/DataLoader.php:

namespace AppBundle\DataFixtures\ORM;

use Hautelook\AliceBundle\Doctrine\DataFixtures\AbstractLoader;

class DataLoader extends AbstractLoader
{
    /**
     * {@inheritdoc}
     */
    public function getFixtures()
    {
        return [
            __DIR__.'/../Fixtures/user.yml',
        ];
    }

    public function concat(...$strings)
    {
        $result = '';

        foreach ($strings as $string) {
            $result .= $string;
        }

        return $result;
    }
}

Now you can use the custom data provider like this.

In AppBundle/DataFixtures/Fixtures/user.yml:

AppBundle\Entity\User:
    user-{1..10}:
        firstname: <firstname()>
        lastname: <lastname()>

        email: <concat(@self->firstname, ".", @self->lastname, "@gmail.com")>
        plainPassword: 123
        username: <concat(@self->firstname, ".", @self->lastname)>

It's a bit tedious to write but it works.

And for php versions prior to php 5.6, you can use func_get_args() to get the list of arguments in DataLoader.php, like this:

    public function concat()
    {
        $result = '';

        foreach (func_get_args() as $string) {
            $result .= $string;
        }

        return $result;
    }