Symfony 2.8/3.0 upgrade: how to deal with form types with variable parameters?

Question

Let's say I create custom form types as services, as it is described in the Symfony documentation. But I want 2 "gender" custom types, with 2 different input parameters, which I was doing like this in Symfony 2.7:

# app/config/config.yml
parameters:
    genders1:
        m: Male
        f: Female
    genders2: # This makes no sense at all, but it is for the example purpose!
        h: Horse
        t: Turtle

And then, I was declaring 2 services like this:

<!-- src/AppBundle/Resources/config/services.xml -->
<service id="app.form.type.gender1" class="AppBundle\Form\Type\GenderType">
    <argument>%genders1%</argument>
    <tag name="form.type" alias="gender1" />
</service>

<service id="app.form.type.gender2" class="AppBundle\Form\Type\GenderType">
    <argument>%genders2%</argument>
    <tag name="form.type" alias="gender2" />
</service>

As you can see, I was using the same GenderType class for 2 custom form types (with the gender1 and gender2 aliases), which I could use like this:

$builder
    ->add('field1', 'gender1')
    ->add('field2', 'gender2');

This allowed me to add some common logic in only one class (GenderType) with different input parameters (I have many more possibilities than 2 in this example).

But as of Symfony 2.8, adding a field using the service alias is deprecated. The class name has to be passed as the second argument instead, like this:

$builder->add('field1', GenderType::class)

So how can I make the difference between my 2 services (each of them not having the same input parameters)?

Creating Gender1Type and Gender2Type extending an abstract GenderType class would be really painful, as I would have to create a lot of classes with empty content.

Do you have any idea on how to implement my pattern in Symfony 2.8, keeping services with different input parameters, but not creating a lot of classes?

Answer 1

Well, after digging this topic a bit more, someone already asked the question directly in the PR concerning this change in Symfony 2.8.

And the answer is that the pattern I was doing is not possible anymore, so I see 2 solutions to my problem:

• Create as many classes as I had services for my custom types instead of using all the time the same class, and make these classes extend an abstract one (in my example: create Gender1Type and Gender2Type classes that extend a AbstractGenderType abstract class)
• Keep only one class, but add options to it to pass my specific parameters.