Trigger Doctrine Event - symfony

Question

I have an event listener for preUpdate Doctrine Event which does the job just fine, but if request data is empty except image_data, it is not triggered. And it's logically correct, because there is no image_data column in an Entity, thus it doesn't see a field to change. The idea is to process image_data array, then do an image upload and finally store filename to image ORM column which works if one of the fields present in request. Let me show my code:
Controller
public function patch($id, Request $request)
{
$data = $request->request->all();
$company = $this->repo->find($id);
$form = $this->createForm(CompanyType::class, $company);
$form->submit($data, false);
if (false === $form->isValid()) {
// error
}
$this->em->flush();
// success
}
Form
// ...
->add('image_data', Types\TextType::class)
->add('image', Types\TextType::class)
// ...
Config
# ...
- { name: doctrine.event_listener, event: preUpdate }
Entity
trait UploadableTrait
{
/**
* #ORM\Column(type="string", length=255, nullable=true)
*/
private $image;
/**
* #Exclude()
*/
private $image_data = [];
How I solved it so far - in BeforeActionSubscriber I set image property to 1 therefore preUpdate is fired, upload is handled and real image filename is stored in result. I believe there is smarter way of doing it. Formerly, I used single image parameter for input/output and it worked for preUpdate because there is such ORM column, however I didn't like this approach because incoming image data is an array (image_name, image_body, content_type and image_size), while output data type is string (filename) and I decided to separate it (image_data for POST|PATCH|PUT and image is just result filename). How may I trigger preUpdate? :)

Answer 1

You can use an updatedAt field like this: https://github.com/dustin10/VichUploaderBundle/blob/master/Resources/doc/known_issues.md#the-file-is-not-updated-if-there-are-not-other-changes-in-the-entity
class MyEntitty
{
// ...
/**
* #ORM\Column(type="datetime")
*
* #var \DateTime|null
*/
private $updatedAt;
// ...
public function setSomething($something): void
{
$this->something= $something;
$this->updatedAt = new \DateTime('now');
}
}