How to implement custom model manager in sonata admin - api

Question

I have a entity in my symfony/sonata application which is not persisted via doctrine orm. Instead i would like to fill the data for these entities on demand by calling an api ...
How can i connect this custom managed entity with my existing model which is managed by doctrine orm?
Is there a way to exchange the doctrine managing part with my custom api calls? I know there are some repository functions like findAll() findBy() and so on ... is the solution to overwrite this functions?
Another approaches?
Thanks

Answer 1

I had a similar use case. I ended up with a solution which is roughly the following.
1) Create a custom ModelManager class. In my case I extended the one provided for Doctrine (Sonata\DoctrineORMAdminBundle\Model\ModelManager), but you can also directly implement Sonata\AdminBundle\Model\ModelManagerInterface.
Override the methdods you need to change (e.g. create(), update(), delete()).
# MyCustomModelManager.php
namespace AppBundle\Admin;
use Sonata\DoctrineORMAdminBundle\Model\ModelManager;
class MyCustomModelManager extends ModelManager {
public function create($object){ // Your custom implementation }
public function create($object){ // Your custom implementation }
public function create($object){ // Your custom implementation }
}
2) Register your new model manager as a service (not needed if you use Symfony 3.3 with the default container configuration, which includes automatic configuration of classes as services)
# services.yml
...
AppBundle\Admin\MyCustomModelManager:
arguments: [ '#doctrine' ]
...
3) Configure your admin class to use your custom model manager, for example:
app.admin.myadmin:
class: AppBundle\Admin\MyAdmin
tags:
- { name: sonata.admin, manager_type: orm }
arguments: [~, AppBundle\Entity\MyEntity, ~]
calls:
- [ setModelManager, [ '#AppBundle\Admin\MyCustomModelManager' ]]
Hope it helps :)