Pimcore Controller

Introduction

Pimcore controllers play the designated role in the MVC pattern. They bind the design patterns together and contain or delegate the functionality of the application. It is good practise to keep the controllers as lean as possible and encapsulate the business logic into models or services/libraries.

Pimcore offers an abstract class (Pimcore\Controller\FrontendController), which can be implemented by your controllers. This abstract class adds some Pimcore specific dispatching features - especially in combination with Pimcore Documents, multi-language support etc.

The naming of the file and the class is just the same as in Symfony.

Pimcore Specialities and Examples

Controller Name	File Name	Class Name	Default View Directory
Content	src/Controller/ContentController.php	App\Controller\ContentController	/templates/content
News	src/Controller/NewsController.php	App\Controller\NewsController	/templates/news

In controllers, for every action there exists a separate method ending with the Action suffix. The DefaultController comes with Pimcore. When you create an empty page in Pimcore it will call the defaultAction in the DefaultController which uses the view /templates/default/default.html.twig.

You can render templates just the standard Symfony way, by either using $this->render('foo.html.twig') or using the #Template[] attribute.

Examples

<?php

namespace App\Controller;

use Pimcore\Controller\FrontendController;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\JsonResponse;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response;
use Pimcore\Controller\Attribute\ResponseHeader;

class DefaultController extends FrontendController
{   
    /**
    * Very simple example using $this->>render() and passing the parameter 'foo'
    */
    public function myAction(): Response
    {
        return $this->render('content/default.html.twig', ["foo" => "bar"]);
    }

    /**
     * Example using the #[Template] attribute to resolve the view. 
     * The frontend controller also provides methods to add response headers or via attributes without having
     * access to the final response object (as it is automatically created when rendering the view).
     *
     */
     #[Template('/default/header.html.twig')]
     #[ResponseHeader(key: "X-Foo", values: ["123456", "98765"])]
    public function headerAction(Request $request): array
    {
        // schedule a response header via code
        $this->addResponseHeader('X-Foo', 'bar', false, $request);
        
        return ["foo" => "bar"];
    }
    
    /**
     * This action returns a JSON response. 
    */
    public function jsonAction(Request $request): JsonResponse
    {
        return $this->json(array('key' => 'value'));
    }
    
    /**
     * This returns a standard symfony Response object 
    */
    public function customAction(Request $request): Response
    {
        return new Response("Just some text");
    }
}

There are also some properties which can be useful:

Name	Type	Description
$this->document	Document	Reference to the current document, if any is available.
$this->editmode	boolean	True if you are in editmode (admin)