Can I use another entity in the route to provide an entity to an entity form?

Question

I am working on a custom content entity that I want to 'link' to a user by adding it as a tab to the user profile. Each user can have one such entity.

My route is defined as follows:

entity.my_entity.edit_form:
  path: '/user/{user}/my_entity'
  defaults:
    _entity_form: my_entity.edit
    _title: 'Edit entity'
  requirements:
    _entity_access: my_entity.update
  options:
    user: \d+

And the tab (module.links.task.yml):

entity.my_entity.edit_form:
  route_name: entity.my_entity.edit_form
  base_route: entity.user.canonical
  title: Entity

Though this works and the tabs show up, they result in a fatal error (cannot return getValue() on null from the getters) presumably because the form does not have an assigned entity.

If I change the route path to /user/{user}/my_entity/{my_entity}, the form works, but I cannot create a tab as the last value is unknown to the routing system.

Can I use the provided user entity instead from the route instead and during the building of the entity form retrieve (and set) the entity I need?

Answer 1

You can use a controller with the user as only route parameter. There you can put the code to retrieve the entity that matches the user and build the entity form:

public function myEntityForm(UserInterface $user) {

  // get $my_entity that matches $user

  $form = $this->entityFormBuilder()->getForm($my_entity);

  return $form;
}