Sorting Lists in Symfony

On my previous post Using Pagination with Symfony and Doctrine I discussed how to implement pagination based what the admin generator created.

With sorting I did pretty much the same, looked around the cache to see what the generator did.

Creating the sortable_header Partial

Create a file named /myproject/apps/myapplication/templates/_sortable_header.php and copy the following code on it. Then save it.

<?php if ($fieldname == $sort[0]): ?>
<?php echo link_to(__($fieldlabel, array(), 'messages'), $routename,
array('query_string' => 'sort='. $fieldname .'&sort_type=' .
($sort[1] == 'asc' ? 'desc' : 'asc'))) ?>
<?php echo image_tag('/images/' .
$sort[1] . '.png', array('alt' => __($sort[1], array(), 'sf_admin'),
'title' => __($sort[1], array(), 'sf_admin'))) ?>
<?php else: ?>
<?php echo link_to(__($fieldlabel, array(), 'messages'), $routename,
array('query_string' => 'sort='. $fieldname .'&sort_type=asc')) ?>
<?php endif; ?>

This template receives 3 variables:
$fieldname: The name of the field as defined in the Object class.
$fieldlabel: The text you want to display in the header. It implements i18n so if your translate your site it will work.
$routename: Name of the route to generate the link.

You'll need to have the asc.png and desc.png on your /myproject/web/images directory in order to get the arrows.

Editing indexSuccess.php

Open your /myproject/apps/myapplication/modules/mymodule/templates/indexSuccess.php
Your column headers should look something like this:

<thead>
<tr>
  <th>Id</th>
  <th>Request date</th>
  <th>Location</th>
  <th>Description</th>
  <th>Repair type</th>
  <th>Repair status</th>
  <th>Real state</th>
  <th>Updated at</th>
  <th>Updated by</th>
</tr>
</thead>

Choose which headers you want to be sortable. Your code should look something like this:

  <thead>
  <tr>
    <th>
       <?php include_partial('global/sortable_header', array('fieldname' 
           => 'id',
          'fieldlabel' => 'Id' ,'routename' => '@repairrequest', 'sort' 
          => $sort)) ?>
    </th>
    <th>
       <?php include_partial('global/sortable_header', array('fieldname' 
          => 'requestDate',
          'fieldlabel' => 'Request Date' ,'routename' => '@repairrequest', 'sort' => $sort)) ?>
    </th>
    <th>
       <?php include_partial('global/sortable_header', array('fieldname' 
          => 'location',
          'fieldlabel' => 'Location' ,'routename' => '@repairrequest', 'sort'
           => $sort)) ?>
    </th>
    <th>Description</th>
    <th>
       <?php include_partial('global/sortable_header', array('fieldname' => 'repair_type_id',
          'fieldlabel' => 'Repair Type' ,'routename' => '@repairrequest', 'sort'
          => $sort)) ?>
    </th>
    <th>
       <?php include_partial('global/sortable_header', array('fieldname' 
          => 'repair_status_id',
          'fieldlabel' => 'Repair Status' ,'routename' => '@repairrequest', 'sort' => $sort)) ?>
    </th>
    <th>
       <?php include_partial('global/sortable_header', array('fieldname' 
            => 'real_state_id',
          'fieldlabel' => 'Real State' ,'routename' => '@repairrequest', 'sort'
           => $sort)) ?>
    </th>
    <th>Updated at</th>
    <th>Updated by</th>
  </tr>
</thead>

But there is a problem with this logic. For columns that are foreign keys it will only sort by the id. For example RepairRequest has a one to many relation with RepairType, so i can sort by foreign keys only, thats why I uses as $fieldname repair_request_id. What we actually want is to sort by the name of the RepairType.
I think I can fix this with a custom query on the action. I'll post the fix when I find it.
For now enjoy!!