In symfony 1 it is possible to have different layouts for an application. But they all have to be put into the directory ‘myproject/apps/frontend/templates/’. But what if you want to use a layout from another location?

Assume you make a plugin with a specific layout, it would be nice to load the layout from the plugin directory, and not to have to copy the file to the global directory.

Here is how you can achieve this:

$template = $this->getContext()->getConfiguration()->getTemplateDir('MODULE', 'LAYOUT_FILE.php');
$this->setLayout($template . '/LAYOUT_FILE');

Let’s say you have the following:

my_project/
  plugins/
    my_plugin/
      modules/
        MyUser/
          actions/
            actions.php
          templates/
            indexSuccess.php
            MyUserLayout.php

The actions.php class could be something like this:

class MyUserAction extends sfActions {

  public function preExecute() {
    $template = $this->getContext()->getConfiguration()->getTemplateDir('MyUser', 'MyUserLayout.php');

    $this->setLayout($template . '/MyUserLayout');
  }

  public function executeIndex() {

  }
}

Have fun!

Those of you who’re developing with symfony under windows will have noticed that, when running tasks in the command prompt, no colors are used. This is because the windows command prompt isn’t compatible with the color notation.
Most of you also have cygwin installed (shame on you if you didn’t :p). But even if you run the tasks through “PuttyCyg”, which is fully compatible with the color notation, you will not benefit from the colors.

Why?

The problem resides in the symfony class “sfAnsiColorFormatter” in the method “supportsColors($stream)”:

  /**
   * Returns true if the stream supports colorization.
   *
   * Colorization is disabled if not supported by the stream:
   *
   *  -  windows
   *  -  non tty consoles
   *
   * @param mixed $stream A stream
   *
   * @return Boolean true if the stream supports colorization, false otherwise
   */
  public function supportsColors($stream)
  {
    return DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR != '\\' && function_exists('posix_isatty') && @posix_isatty($stream);
  }

The method supportsColors($stream) decides whether or not colors are supported. And as you can see, one of the checks is the directory separator which in our case will always return false because we are on a windows operating system. So even if you run tasks through puttycyg the directory separator will remain the same.

Possibility 1

If you always work through the puttycyg you could simply set the method to always return true, but in a command prompt it will look like this:

Dos Command Output

Possibility 2

Detect if cygwin is used. This way when you use the dos command the output will work and when cygwin is used you’ll have the colors .

I checked the $_SERVER array to find something that could help me to distinguish the cygwin prompt with the dos prompt, and I found that the ‘PWD’ key is only available on *nix shells. And when I print the value of $_SERVER['PWD'] in the cygwin prompt it gives me “/cygdrive/f/sandbox/adlogix/branch-3.2/frontend”.

Knowing that, here is how we can change the supportsColors method:

  /**
   * Returns true if the stream supports colorization.
   *
   * Colorization is disabled if not supported by the stream:
   *
   *  -  windows
   *  -  non tty consoles
   *
   * @param mixed $stream A stream
   *
   * @return Boolean true if the stream supports colorization, false otherwise
   */
  public function supportsColors($stream)
  {
    $supported = DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR != '\\' && function_exists('posix_isatty') && @posix_isatty($stream);

    return $supported ? true : !is_bool(strpos(@$_SERVER['PWD'], "/cygdrive"));
  }

What I did, is still using the check symfony used, but when it returns false I do a second check to see if the $_SERVER['PWD'] exists and that it contains the String “/cygdrive”.

Now when I run the taks through cygwin I get the colors and when I run it in dos it displays correctly.

PuttyCyg versus Dos

I only tested it on my machine, so if you have troubles or a better way to do it, please let me know .

Update: This is only tested with symfony 1.2 and as from sf 1.3 there will be an option –color to force the colors.

Update: For some reason it does not work in the cygwin bash shell. When I set the message manually (echo -e “\033[31mHello World\033[0m”) in the command the colors appear, but through symfony not. I suspect that the cygwin bash shell miss interprets the returns of php, but I have no idea why it does work on puttyCyg (which only launches the cygwin shell) … probably some startup configuration of the bash ?!

It is always hard to tell what the future will bring, especially in a world where everything is evolving so quickly. But it’s always good to know what libraries, languages or applications will influence the way we work or the language we code in. There for I took the time to create an overview of what could be interesting in the near and far future.  If you have any remarks or other ideas, I would be happy to hear them in the comments.

HTML 5

Jon Von Tetzchner (director of Opera) recently announced that HTML 5 will replace Flash almost completely. Will it go that far? I don’t think so, but what we will be able to do with it is quite impressive!

• Extension of the DOM with new elements like: section, audio, video, canvas, etc…
• New attributes like: ping, charset, async
• Id, tabindex and repeat for every element

As you can see the HTML 5 will be an expansion of HTML 4 but with rather important differences. We can expect HTML 5 to get its W3C Candidate Recommendation in 2012 but it will be able to use some of the features sooner. One of those is canvas that is already a widely implemented element.

Serge Jespers wrote a post on his weblog as a reaction on what Jon Von Tetzchner said and you can read about it here http://www.webkitchen.be/2009/05/27/adobe-versus-the-open-web/ He is an Adobe platform evangelist and Adobe pays his payckeck every month, but I do think the guy has a point.

JavaScript 2.0

With JavaScript being more popular than ever this is certainly worth taking a look at. John Resig created a slideshow on what will be changed in the 2.0 version and I must say that it looks promising.

PHP 6

A lot of people swear by the use of PHP over other language (like me ) and a lot of other people say that PHP just isn’t sufficient enough. They are probably right because there are some insufficiencies in PHP, but in version 6 a few of those will be reviewed and adjusted. For now v6 is available as a developer snapshot so if you want you can already try it out.

Improved Unicode support.
This was a really necessary to keep up with other languages like JAVA that have a better i18n (internationalization) support, in this way PHP will close up the gap it had and support you with a much broader set of characters.

Namespaces
Namespaces are a way of avoiding name collisions between functions and classes without using prefixes in naming conventions that make the names of your methods and classes unreadable. By using namespaces we can never have the problem that 2 classes with the same name interfere with each other. I’m still wondering if this is the best solution but we’ll have to find out in the future. I’m only struggling with the idea that this only moves the problem to a higher level, as you now have to make sure your namespaces aren’t the same.

XML
XMLReader and XMLWriter will become part of the PHP core, which will make it easier to work with XML in PHP.

Magic_quotes and register_globals will be removed from PHP as they are a huge problem in PHP security.

It is from version 6 required to use tags as the ASP-style tags are no longer supported (<% %>)

Those are the biggest changes, again, just like in JavaScript some of these changes are already implemented in a PHP5.3
So in a nutshell, I do believe that PHP has a superb future in front of it, but that is also because of frameworks like Symfony, CakePhp, Zend, etc.

This is a post especially for those who use Mantis as a bug tracker software and Eclipse as development software. For our PHP and JAVA development we do all the programming in Eclipse and wouldn’t it be easy if Eclipse recognized the bugs we are working? Wouldn’t it be easy if we could just get an automatic link between mantis and the commits we do in subversion (svn).

Well, praise the lord, ’cause there is an open source project out there that does all these things called Mylyn.

Mylyn is a task-focused interface for Eclipse that reduces information overload and makes multi-tasking easy. It does this by making tasks a first class part of Eclipse, and integrating rich and offline editing for repositories such as Bugzilla, Trac, and JIRA. Once your tasks are integrated, Mylyn monitors your work activity to identify relevant information, and uses this task context to focus the user interface on the task-at-hand. This puts the information you need at your fingertips and improves productivity by reducing searching, scrolling, and navigation. By making task context explicit Mylyn also facilitates multitasking, planning, reusing past efforts, and sharing expertise.

After a quick install and doing the configuration in Eclipse the interface is installed in Eclipse and ready to work with. And it is great! Easy overviews of all the bugs sorted by filter as you personally prefer, great layout to create and manage the bugs, etc.

It communicates quite nice with mantis, it could be a bit faster but let’s not fall over that tiny thing. The cool thing though is when working for a specific bug, all changes will be committed on those files with a reference to that specific bug. This makes it very easy to get see what files where changed for a specific bug.

For example when you commit changed files you will be asked to comment your committed files. Mylyn links your files directly to the current bug you are working on and puts this in the comment area: “fixed issue #178: Change user name to full name” . The number of the issue and the state are first mentioned and the title completes your comment.

In the screenshot you can see how a bug can be inserted or edited in a easy layout and inside the eclipse environment. Click on the image or here to see a larger image

My colleague Toni also installed WebSVN that gives us a super overview on all those changes and files committed in subversion.

If you use Mantis and Eclipse and SVN I highly recommend that you use these two utilities.

Tomorrow on the 9th of may an event called ‘PHP TestFest 2009′ will take place in the offices of Combell. (visit the website)

What is TestFest you ask?

The TestFest is an event that aims at improving the code coverage of the test suite for the PHP language itself. As part of this event, local User Groups (UG) are invited to join the TestFest. These UGs can meet physically or come together virtually. The point however is that people network to learn together. Aside from being an opportunity for all of you to make friends with like minded people in your (virtual) community, it also will hopefully reduce the work load for the PHP.net mentors. All it takes is someone to organize a UG to spearhead the event and to get others involved in writing phpt tests. The submissions will then be reviewed by members of php.net before getting included in the official test suite.

This event will take place in different countries but for the dutch speaking PHP community you can go to these addresses:

Hogeschool Domstad, Koningsbergerstraat 9, 3531 AJ Utrecht,The Netherlands

And

Combell offices Ghent, Skaldenstraat 121, 9042 Gent, Belgium (more info)

There will be a workshop to get the needed information and then it’s your turn to contribute to the development of the PHP language.

Felix De Vliegher is the mentor for Belgium and did the most tests in 2008 in the whole freaking world. With his experience and vision, this will be a piece of cake, be there or be square…. (maybe I will write about Felix later in our topic interesting people)

For those who will be on this event, have fun!!!!

Our goal is to create a little crud that contains 4 fields

id (auto increment integer)
name (varchar 50)
value (double)
type (0 or 1)

What I will explain is how to change your fields in the form after creation with generation of a module. So we start with a clean module that contains 1 action class and 3 templates (new, edit and index) and 1 partial (form) that is included on the new and edit template.
We created this module not by hand but with the very easy command: symfony propel:generate-module.

So what we want to do is quite easy, but if you are not used to working with forms, this is already a big struggle. So go to the action and you will see that in the executeNew method a form is initialized with an instance of a class (in our case DiscountForm).

public function executeNew(sfWebRequest $request)
{
$this->form = new DiscountForm();
}

If you now go to the page in your browser you will see that the form is build up for you in a very basic way, containing no layout and just the 4 labels, the input fields and a submit button. If you want the user to see error messages when he has forgotten to fill in a required field or if you want to add a field to the form you can do that in the DiscountForm by adding a function configure().

class DiscountForm extends BaseDiscountForm  {
public function configure() {
//insert extra data
}
}

Now, as we don’t want the user to select 0 or 1 when choosing his type, we let him use a dropdown with understandable content to choose from. 0 is discount and 1 is up count. The purpose of the type is that the number inserted in the value field will be added or subtracted.

To do this we create a public $type array containing the discount and up count in the Discount class in the model. We do this in the model class because, in this way, we can re-use this in other methods later as we might need this in the templates or other classes.

static public $types = array(
'0' => 'Discount',
'1' => 'Up count',
);

And in the configure method we put this:

$this->widgetSchema['type'] = new sfWidgetFormChoice(array(
'choices'  => Discount::$types,
'expanded' => true,
));

If you reload your view on this point you will see that the type field has changed to a radio button field, which is easier to read.

You can style the form by adding some attributes to your fields:

<?php echo $form['discount']->render(array('class' => 'page-input', 'size' => 5));  ?>

Page-input is the class specified in the css and giving the field a proper layout and size is the width of the field, in this case 5.
All other attributes your element can accept can be inserted like this.

That’s actually it, if you followed these easy steps, you created your own basic crud. How nice it all looks will all depend on the css you use. For a few templates on forms you can take a look at this post

When creating forms in symfony which extends from a Base (ORM) class, you sometimes do not need all fields that Propel/Doctrine generates for you. If you want to remove them you have several ways to do so.

1. Unset the fiels you don’t need.

public function configure() {
  unset($this['field1'], $this['field2'], ... );
}

Simple way to remove the fields you don’t want, but if you change something in your database, which has an impact on that form (new column, foreignkey, etc ), it will be added in the (generated) super class. And if you don’t update the unset function with that extra field, it will be expected in the form. Unless you have unit tests for all your forms this could brake it without knowing it.

2. Override the setup function.

/**
 * @override
 */
public function setup()
  {
    parent::setup();

    $this->setWidgets(...);

    $this->setValidators(...);
  }

Another way is to override the setup function and do your own widgets and validators initialization. This is a good way to only intialize the fields you really need, but you’ll have to do what your ORM generated for you.

3. Use a function which unsets all fields except the one you need (like the enableAllPluginsExcept function).

$this->unsetAllFieldsExcept(array(
      'field1',
      'field2',
      'field3',
      ...));

This would be usefull, because it will remove all fields you do not want to use, and even if new fields are added it will not use them. The drawback is that if you have 20 fields and only need to unset one of them, you’ll have more type work .
Since it does not exist in symfony, I quickly created our own function. This function should be added in the class BaseFormPropel.class:

abstract class BaseFormPropel extends sfFormPropel
{
  public function setup() {
  }

  protected function unsetAllFieldsExcept($fields = array()) {

    $unsetFields = array_diff(array_keys($this->getWidgetSchema()->getFields()), $fields);

    foreach($unsetFields as $value) {
      unset($this[$value]);
    }
  }
}

Which one to use ?
None of them are better. But if you need to reset a majority of the fields the ORM has generated then I would go for the method 2. If you only need to unset the fields you do not want to use then I would use the function unsetAllFieldsExcept().

Which method do/would you use ?

Ever tried to create a Symfony form with a check box input field, which by default should be unchecked ? No ? Well read on because it’s not that easy .

This would be the code to print a check box input field in a Symfony form:

class CheckboxForm extends BaseCheckboxForm {
 public function configure() {
 $this->widgetSchema['field'] = new sfWidgetFormInputCheckbox();
 }
}

When you use the form to create something then by default the check box should be unchecked. And when you use this form for editing, then the check box should be checked if the object you try to edit has already been checked in the past.

If you try this code, you’ll see that the check box will always be checked. Even if you display this form to create a new object. Strange no ?

The problem is due to a bug in the Symfony sfWidgetFormInputCheckbox class. Even worse, this bug has been reported the first time 10 months ago (trac #3917) and 1 month later (trac #3996) and it’s still not fixed ! (grrrrr)

Until Symfony bug fixes this issue, there are 2 work a rounds you can use.

1. Edit the sfWidgetFormInputCheckbox class and patch it:

actual

class sfWidgetFormInputCheckbox extends sfWidgetFormInput
{
 ...
 public function render($name, $value = null, $attributes = array(), $errors = array())
 {
 if (!is_null($value) && $value !== false)
 {
 $attributes['checked'] = 'checked';
 }
 ...
 }
}

patched

class sfWidgetFormInputCheckbox extends sfWidgetFormInput
{
 ...
 public function render($name, $value = null, $attributes = array(), $errors = array())
 {
 if (!is_null($value) && $value !== false && $value != 0)
 {
 $attributes['checked'] = 'checked';
 }
 ...
 }
}

I would not recommend this, because if like us, you have more than one Symfony environment, there is a chance that you could forget to patch it. And worse if Symfony releases a new version without the bug fix you’ll have to remember to re patch the file.

2. Extend the sfWidgetFormInputCheckbox class and override the render method:

Edit: Put this class in the lib folder and call it myOwnWidgetFormInputCheckbox.class.php. After that run symfony cc.

/**
 * FIXME: This class can be removed if the sfWidgetFormInputCheckbox bug
 * has been resolved in symfony.
 */
class myOwnWidgetFormInputCheckbox extends sfWidgetFormInputCheckbox
{
 /**
 * Override render method due to symfony bug (http://trac.symfony-project.org/ticket/3917)
 */
 public function render($name, $value = null, $attributes = array(), $errors = array())
 {
 if (!is_null($value) && $value !== false && $value != 0)
 {
 $attributes['checked'] = 'checked';
 } 

 if (!isset($attributes['value']) && !is_null($this->getOption('value_attribute_value'))) {
 $attributes['value'] = $this->getOption('value_attribute_value');
 }

 return parent::render($name, null, $attributes, $errors);
 }
}

Your form class should then be changed to:

class CheckboxForm extends BaseCheckboxForm {
 public function configure() {
 $this->widgetSchema['field'] = new myOwnWidgetFormInputCheckbox();
 }
}

This was very easy to solve, but we lost a lot of time in finding the reason why this stupido check box was always checked. And why the hell is this bug still not solved in Symfony ?

In the mean time patch your symfony or create your own checkbox widget .

I was wondering around on the big wide scary web and saw a lot of badly written comment for code so I thought it shouldn’t be bad to give a little overview on how comment should be written, at least how I think it should be written.

Not all comments can be written in the same way and not all comments can be read by other programs but I personally think the Java comment is the most readable one, and (huge advantage) can be read by the Javadoc processor. When writing in PHP this is done in the same way as PHPDoc is an adaptation of Javadoc.

So write your comment like this:

/**
 * This is a basic description of your method,
 * write down here what the function does in general
 *
 *@param integer $id
 *@return array Array of objects
 *@author Kenneth van Rumste
 */

As you can see we have the general description of a method first, written in a few words. Only write more if this is really necessary. Comments are there to help when the developer doesn’t understand the code and everybody should keep in mind that the name of a method should contain the basic information about what’s happing inside. For example don’t use methodName1 for a method, but retrieveDailyUsers to select the daily users. So you don’t need a lot of extra comment to explain what is happening, Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror) wrote a great post last year on the usage of comments.

In the second part you can see a bunch of tags added into the comment, these are very handy when writing code as they inform parsers how to display documentation and allow IDE to define variable types.

I added only the basic data to the comment and a lot more tags can be added but as I m a lazy guy you can check them all out here.

To finish this post let us take a look at some of my all time favorite, comment jokes

stop(); // Hammertime!

Catch (Exception e) {  
//who cares?
}   

Exception up = new Exception("Something is really wrong.");

throw up;  //ha ha   

doRun.run();  // ... "a doo run run".   

long long ago; /* in a galaxy far far away */   

/////////////////////////////////////// this is a well commented line

//Abandon all hope yea who enter beyond this point   

//Woulda
if(x) {}
//Shoulda
else if(y) {}
//Coulda
else {}   

/* This isn't the right way to deal with this,
but today is my last day, Ron just spilled coffee on my desk,
and I'm hungry, so this will have to do... */
return 12; // 12 is my lucky number   

#define TRUE FALSE //Happy debugging suckers   

// TODO - Comment this function

For a lot of people dates in PHP are an issue, and the PHP functions aren’t sufficient enough to do all converts you need.
Therefore you find a few easy PHP date conversion methods. Feel free to add your own methods or requests in the comments as we know that these methods don’t cover everything. You can see it for yourself when you read the rest of this entry:

• get start and end date for the next two months in an array
• get the datetime for a specific user culture in Symfony
• get all days between a given start and end date and return it in an array
• get the difference between two dates

1. get start and end date for the next two months in an array
   input: nothing
   output:
   array[0] = 1239706452
   array[1] = 1244976852
   *updated -> thx naholyr

   /**
    * get the next two months starting from today.
    *
    * @return array
    */
    public function getNextTwoMonths(){
    return array(time(), strtotime(’+2 month’));
    }
   

2. get the datetime for a specific user culture in Symfony
   input: 16/09/08
   output: 2008-09-16 23:35:55

    /**
    * Parses a date String from a specific culture to a Date.
    *
    * input example: 16/09/08
    *
    * returns: DateTime (Date)
    * @param String $period
    * @return Array of DateTime objects
    */
    public function parseDate($period) {
   
    $userCulture =  sfContext::getInstance()->getUser()->getCulture();
   
    $timestamp = sfContext::getInstance()->getI18N()->getTimestampForCulture($period, $userCulture);
   
    $period = new DateTime(date('Y-m-d H:i:s', $timestamp));
   
    return $period;
    }
   

3. get all days between a given start and end date and return it in an array.
   input: 2 DateTime dates
   output: array of days
   day[0] = 2008-12-10
   day[1] = 2008-12-11

   /**
    * With a given start and end date it will creates all the dates in between and return
    * it in an array.
    *
    * @param DateTime $startDate
    * @param DateTime $endDate
    * @return Array
    */
    public function getDaysByPeriod(DateTime $startDate, DateTime $endDate) {
   
    $startDt = clone $startDate;
   
    $days = array();
   
    while ( $startDt->format('U') <= $endDt->format('U') ) {
    $days[] = $startDt->format('Y-m-d');
    $startDt->modify("+1 days");
    }
   
    return $days;
    }
   

4. get the difference between two dates
   input:
   2009-04-14 10:08:35
   2009-04-15 10:10:35
   output: unix timestamp of the difference
   * updated -> thx Toni and David

   /**
    * get the difference between two dates
    *
    * @param date $firstTime
    * @param date $lastTime
    * @return integer
    */
   public function timeDiff($firstTime,$lastTime)
   {
    return strtotime($lastTime) - strtotime($firstTime);
   }