Stefan Macke

As I’ve mentioned earlier, the FLOW3 documentation is a bit weak at the moment. The initial example walks you through a very simple view where only strings (like “title”, “author”) are entered via the view’s form. But how do you enter a date and have it converted to a “real” \DateTime upon initializing the object that should contain it?

I found the solution (again, mainly by chance) here: How to use the DateTimeConverter in FLOW3. Apparently, you have to convert the user’s input to the needed objects in a method in the corresponding controller, that is (magically?) called before the method that expects the main object you want to create (that contains the date).

Here’s an example: If you have a Report object that has a dueDate attribute of type \DateTime, you have to convert the user input (a string) to a \DateTime object in the method initializeCreateAction() of class ReportController.

FLOW3 offers quite a few type converters, among which you can also find a DateTimeConverter. You can use it like this in initializeCreateAction():

public function createAction(Report $report) { ... } public function initializeCreateAction() { $this->arguments['report'] ->getPropertyMappingConfiguration() ->forProperty('dueDate') ->setTypeConverterOption( 'TYPO3\FLOW3\Property\TypeConverter\DateTimeConverter', \TYPO3\FLOW3\Property\TypeConverter\DateTimeConverter::CONFIGURATION_DATE_FORMAT, 'Y-m-d'); }

FLOW3 now converts the input string (format ‘Y-m-d’) into a “real” \DateTime object before passing it on to the newly created Report object, that gets passed to createAction().

FLOW3 rocks. However, the current documentation is… well… a bit short 🙂 The quickstart guide and the blog example show you the basics of working with FLOW3 and Fluid, its templating engine. But for explanations or examples of even the slightest more complex functionality you have to search the web for quite some time (or at least I had to ;-)).

Like today: I wanted to map an object of type Invoice to an object of type Client in a Fluid view. How do you do that, so that FLOW3 instantiates a real Client object and hands it over to the Invoice object upon its instantiation? It turns out, all you have to provide the framework to magically do that, is something like a select tag with the Client objects’ GUIDs like this:

<select name="client"> <option value="80f870ee-931c-4706-8716-fb3e52bbe450">Client 1</option> <option value="fb2cd21e-64e8-439b-bff2-be51948b8ff5">Client 2</option> </select>

But how do you do that using Fluid? I found the solution (mainly by chance) here: FLOW3 – your first relation between to models.

<f:form.select property="client" name="client" options="{clients}" optionLabelField="name" />

If you omit the attribute optionValueField on the view helper f:form (see Fluid ViewHelper Reference), the objects’ GUIDs are magically used for the values of the options in the HTML form and FLOW3 figures out that it has to instantiate Client objects.