How to implement custom model manager in sonata admin

Question

I have a entity in my symfony/sonata application which is not persisted via doctrine orm. Instead i would like to fill the data for these entities on demand by calling an api ... How can i connect this custom managed entity with my existing model which is managed by doctrine orm? Is there a way to exchange the doctrine managing part with my custom api calls? I know there are some repository functions like findAll() findBy() and so on ... is the solution to overwrite this functions?

Another approaches?

Thanks

Answer 1

I had a similar use case. I ended up with a solution which is roughly the following.

1) Create a custom ModelManager class. In my case I extended the one provided for Doctrine (Sonata\DoctrineORMAdminBundle\Model\ModelManager), but you can also directly implement Sonata\AdminBundle\Model\ModelManagerInterface. Override the methdods you need to change (e.g. create(), update(), delete()).

# MyCustomModelManager.php

namespace AppBundle\Admin;

use Sonata\DoctrineORMAdminBundle\Model\ModelManager;

class MyCustomModelManager extends ModelManager {

    public function create($object){ // Your custom implementation }

    public function create($object){ // Your custom implementation }

    public function create($object){ // Your custom implementation }

}

2) Register your new model manager as a service (not needed if you use Symfony 3.3 with the default container configuration, which includes automatic configuration of classes as services)

# services.yml

...
AppBundle\Admin\MyCustomModelManager:
    arguments: [ '@doctrine' ]
...

3) Configure your admin class to use your custom model manager, for example:

app.admin.myadmin:
    class: AppBundle\Admin\MyAdmin
    tags:
        - { name: sonata.admin, manager_type: orm }
    arguments: [~, AppBundle\Entity\MyEntity, ~]
    calls:
        - [ setModelManager, [ '@AppBundle\Admin\MyCustomModelManager' ]]

Hope it helps :)