Sort list view in Sonata Admin by related entity fields

Question

Using Sonata Admin Bundle, which is a great add-on for Symfony, I have bumped into the problem described as follows.

Let's say we have 3 entities: City, State and Country. They all have the properties id and name. City has a many-to-one relation to State and State has a many-to-one relation to Country. They all have __toString methods displaying the value of the property name.

We can create a list view for the entity City in Sonata Admin like this:

protected function configureListFields(ListMapper $listMapper)
{
    $listMapper
        ->addIdentifier('id')
        ->add('name')
        ->add('state')
        ->add('state.country')
    ;
}

For illustration the view could look like this:

|-----||--------------------||--------------------||--------------------|
| Id ^|| Name ^             || State              || State Country      |
|-----||--------------------||--------------------||--------------------|    
| 1   || New York           || New York           || USA                |
| 2   || Acapulco           || Guerrero           || Mexico             |
| 3   || Calgary            || Alberta            || Canada             |
| 4   || Tijuana            || Baja California    || Mexico             |
| 5   || Vancouver          || British Columbia   || Canada             |
| 6   || Los Angeles        || California         || USA                |
|-----||--------------------||--------------------||--------------------|

Per default the list is sortable by the columns Id and Name, the sign ^ should depict that. I would like to be able to sort the list by the related entity fields and have a link pointing to the show action for the related entity.

Here is how I have achieved the sorting by State:

//...
->add('state', null, array(
    'route' => array('name' => 'show'),
    'sortable' => true,
    'sort_field_mapping' => array('fieldName' => 'name'), // property name of entity State
    'sort_parent_association_mappings' => array(array('fieldName' => 'state')) // property state of entity City
))
//...

Now the list view is sortable by the property name of the entity State and all fields in the column State point to the show page for the current state:

|-----||--------------------||--------------------||--------------------|
| Id ^|| Name ^             || State ^            || State Country      |
|-----||--------------------||--------------------||--------------------|    
| 3   || Calgary            || Alberta            || Canada             |
| 4   || Tijuana            || Baja California    || Mexico             |
| 5   || Vancouver          || British Columbia   || Canada             |
| 6   || Los Angeles        || California         || USA                |
| 2   || Acapulco           || Guerrero           || Mexico             |
| 1   || New York           || New York           || USA                |
|-----||--------------------||--------------------||--------------------|

How do I sort the list view by the Country (City->State->Country)? Something like this:

|-----||--------------------||--------------------||--------------------|
| Id ^|| Name ^             || State ^            || State Country      |
|-----||--------------------||--------------------||--------------------|    
| 3   || Calgary            || Alberta            || Canada             |
| 5   || Vancouver          || British Columbia   || Canada             |
| 2   || Acapulco           || Guerrero           || Mexico             |
| 4   || Tijuana            || Baja California    || Mexico             |
| 6   || Los Angeles        || California         || USA                |
| 1   || New York           || New York           || USA                |
|-----||--------------------||--------------------||--------------------|

When I try something like the above code snippet:

//...
->add('state.country', null, array(
    'route' => array('name' => 'show'),
    'sortable' => true,
    'sort_field_mapping' => array('fieldName' => 'country.name'), // property name of entity Country
    'sort_parent_association_mappings' => array(array('fieldName' => 'state.country')) // property country of entity State
))
//...

then an exception error is thrown. I tried different combinations, but all without success.

I could do:

  protected function configureListFields(ListMapper $listMapper)
{
    $listMapper
        ->addIdentifier('id')
        ->add('name')
        ->add('state.name')
        ->add('state.country.name')
    ;
}

and get the sorting issue solved, but then there are no links to the entities.

The official documentation is very good, but is missing this topic. So, how to sort a list view by hierarchical entities?

Sort list view in Sonata Admin by related entity fields

1 Answers