Controller

The Controller class represents a bunch of pages relating to the same subject (Model in most cases) - for example, there is a PlayerController, a TeamController and a HomeController.

Controllers contain special methods called 'actions', which are essentially different pages performing different actions - for example, the TeamController might contain a 'show' action, which renders the team's page, and a 'new' action, which renders the page that is shown to the user when they want to create a new team.

Actions have some unique characteristics. Take a look at this sample action:

public function showAction(Request $request, Team $team) {
  return array('team' => $team);
}

The following route will make sure that showAction() handles the request:

team_show:
  pattern:    /teams/{team}
  defaults: { _controller: 'Team', _action: 'show' }

First of all, the method's name should end with Action. The parameters are passed dynamically, and the order is insignificant.

You can request Symfony's Request or Session class, or even a model, which will be generated based on the route parameters. For example, the route pattern /posts/{post}/comments/{commentId} (note how you can use both comment and commentId as parameters - just make sure to use the correct variable name on the method later) and can be used with actions like these:

public function sampleAction (Request $request, NewsArticle $post, Comment $comment)

public function sampleAction (NewsArticle $post, Session $session, Request $request, Comment $comment)

A method's return value can be: - Symfony's Response Class - A string representing the text you want the user to see - An array representing the variables you want to pass to the controller's view, so that it can be rendered