How to use the Symfony DateType Field

In a sea of ​​frameworks that work with the PHP language, Symfony has managed to stand out and become one of the most used by experts in this language. Introduced to the market in 2005, Symfony is an open-source framework made up of PHP components designed to develop robust and high-performance web applications in an agile way. It speeds up the tasks of the developers so that the process is effective.

In this blog, we will talk about the fields that make Symfony one of the most complete PHP frameworks on the market, specifically the Symfony DateType Field, learning a little about how to use it and what its function is.

Symfony DateType Field

A form is made up of fields, each of which is constructed with the help of a field type (eg TextType, ChoiceType, etc.). Symfony comes out of the box with a large list of field types that can be used in your application.

Symfony DateType Field is a field that allows the user to modify the date information in an application created with this framework through a variety of different HTML elements. This field can be rendered in a variety of different ways via the widget option and can comprise a number of different input formats via the input option.

Basic use of this field or document

One of the advantages of this field is its ability to be configured. Among its most important options are input and widget.

Suppose you have a PublishedAt field whose underlying date is a DateTime object. The following sets the date type for that field to three different choice fields:

use Symfony\Component\Form\Extension\Core\Type\DateType;
// ...

$builder->add('publishedAt', DateType::class, [
    'widget' => 'choice',
]);

If your application's underlying date is not a DateTime object (for example, it is a Unix timestamp or a DateTimeImmutable object), set the input option:

$builder->add('publishedAt', DateType::class, [
    'widget' => 'choice',
    'input' => 'datetime_immutable'
]);

Symfony features that make it stand out from other PHP frameworks

Symfony has some features that could be interesting and attractive for some developers, among these, are:

• Your system based on Model-View-Controller
• The high performance achieved when developing a web application
• A flexible URI routing
• Create a code that is reusable and therefore easier to maintain
• It allows you to manage sessions and track errors.
• Full-featured database classes with cross-platform support
• It has a large community of developers that remains active
• It has a set of decoupled and reusable components.
• Standardization and interoperability of applications
• Security against cross-site request forgery and other attacks

How is it different from other PHP frameworks?

With its unique features, Symfony is often compared to other frameworks that use the PHP programming language, with Laravel being its biggest competitor. In an analysis carried out by our expert developers in this language, the differences between these two frameworks were discussed:

Performance and scalability

While Symfony caches views and source code by default, Laravel already comes with a set of standardized APIs that work for caching views. In this section, a website developed with Symfony will take longer to load, while one developed with Laravel can take approximately 60 milliseconds.

The database support system

In this section, Symfony uses Doctrine for its data processing, while Laravel uses Eloquent. In the former, the database transfer is automatic, but the developer has to identify the particular fields within the code. In Laravel, there is no need to declare fields when migrating a database.

Data Modeling

To access data in Laravel, the developer is required to have a deep understanding of SQL. Because it is based on Eloquent, it tends to tie your application to your database schema design, so if you change the name of a single column, the entire database can be affected. In Symfony, based on Doctrine, the mapper pattern is used, allowing you to distinguish between your database schema and your business objects and logic.

You can read about these and other differences in our blog dedicated to these two PHP frameworks, which are fighting for the favoritism of specialists in this language, constantly renewing themselves, and introducing functionalities and features that only manage to create modern applications and websites with better benefits for us users.

At Rootstack, our team of expert developers has worked on numerous occasions with Symfony and other PHP frameworks to quickly solve our clients' technological problems. If you want to be part of a technology company with the highest level of growth in Latin America, click here and start growing as a professional.

We recommend you on video