Conventions¶

The Coding Standards document describes the coding standards for the Symfony2 projects and the internal and third-party bundles. This document describes coding standards and conventions used in the core framework to make it more consistent and predictable. You are encouraged to follow them in your own code, but you don’t need to.

Method Names¶

When an object has a “main” many relation with related “things” (objects, parameters, ...), the method names are normalized:

get()

set()

has()

all()

replace()

remove()

clear()

isEmpty()

add()

register()

count()

keys()

The usage of these methods are only allowed when it is clear that there is a main relation:

a CookieJar has many Cookie objects;
a Service Container has many services and many parameters (as services is the main relation, we use the naming convention for this relation);
a Console Input has many arguments and many options. There is no “main” relation, and so the naming convention does not apply.

For many relations where the convention does not apply, the following methods must be used instead (where XXX is the name of the related thing):

Main Relation	Other Relations
`get()`	`getXXX()`
`set()`	`setXXX()`
n/a	`replaceXXX()`
`has()`	`hasXXX()`
`all()`	`getXXXs()`
`replace()`	`setXXXs()`
`remove()`	`removeXXX()`
`clear()`	`clearXXX()`
`isEmpty()`	`isEmptyXXX()`
`add()`	`addXXX()`
`register()`	`registerXXX()`
`count()`	`countXXX()`
`keys()`	n/a

Note

While “setXXX” and “replaceXXX” are very similar, there is one notable difference: “setXXX” may replace, or add new elements to the relation. “replaceXXX” on the other hand is specifically forbidden to add new elements, but most throw an exception in these cases.