entity-listeners.rst

Entity Listeners

To set up an entity listener, start by creating a listener class:

// src/EventListener/UserListener
namespace App\EventListener;

use Doctrine\ORM\Event\LifecycleEventArgs;
use App\Entity\User;

class UserListener
{    
    public function prePersist(User $user, LifecycleEventArgs $event)
    {
        // ...
    }
}

Next, you have to register the class as a listener. There are two ways to achieve this:

You can either do the registration in your entity like this:

// src/Entity/User.php
namespace App\Entity\User;

use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;

/**
 * @ORM\Entity
 * @ORM\EntityListeners({"App\EventListener\UserListener"})
 */
class User
{
    // ...
}

This works fine, but your event listener will not be registered as a service (even if you have autowire: true in your services.yaml). So to register it as a service, you have to add this to your services.yaml:

services:
    App\EventListener\UserListener:
        tags:
            - { name: doctrine.orm.entity_listener }

<?xml version="1.0" ?>

<container xmlns="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">

    <services>
        <service id="App\EventListener\UserListener">
            <tag name="doctrine.orm.entity_listener" />
        </service>
    </services>
</container>

Alternatively, you could do the entire configuration in services.yaml and omit the @ORM\EntityListeners annotation in the entity:

services:
    App\EventListener\UserListener:
        tags:
            - { name: doctrine.orm.entity_listener, entity: App\Entity\User, event: prePersist }

To register the listener for a custom entity manager, just add the entity_manager attribute.

See also https://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-orm/en/current/reference/events.html#entity-listeners for more info on entity listeners.