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 ?!

Recently I had to create a form to create/update users in our system. Some time ago we decided to save are users in 2 tables. The first table would contain all login information and the second his personal information. This is a simple example of the DB design:

User db design

I would not recommend doing this for so little fields. But in our system we have a lot more fields, and it helps us to optimize our queries.

Wouldn’t it be better if we could merge the 2 forms? The answer is yes. And it’s pretty easy to do so in Symfony … too bad that it’s not documented on the Symfony website.

When you generate the forms with Symfony, you’ll get a UserForm and a UserInfoForm.

/**
* User form.
*
* @package    form
*/
class UserForm extends BaseUserForm {

public function configure() {

}

}

/**
* UserInfo form.
*
* @package    form
*/
class UserInfoForm extends BaseUserInfoForm {

public function configure() {

}

}

The idea is to display one form to insert/update those 2 tables. If you are familiar to creating forms with Symfony you know that you could achieve it by instantiating the 2 forms in an action and send them to the templates:

/**
* Action Class
*/
class userActions extends sfActions
{
public function executeCreate($request) {
$this->userForm = new UserForm();
$this->userInfoForm = new UserInfoForm();
$this->setTemplate('edit');
}

public function executeEdit($request) {
$this->userForm = new UserForm(UserPeer::retrieveByPK($request->getParameter('id')));
$this->userInfoForm = new UserInfoForm(UserInfoPeer::retrieveByPK($request->getParameter('id')));
}

public function executeUpdate($request) {
$this->userForm = new UserForm(UserPeer::retrieveByPK($request->getParameter('id')));
$this->userInfoForm = new UserInfoForm(UserInfoPeer::retrieveByPK($request->getParameter('id')));

$this->userForm->bind($request->getParameter($this->userForm->getName()));
$this->userInfoForm->bind($request->getParameter($this->userInfoForm->getName()));

// etc ...
}
}

// Template code editSuccess.php
<?php $user = $userForm->getObject(); ?>

<form action="<?php echo url_for('user/update'.(!$user->isNew() ? '?id='.$user->getId() : '')) ?>" method="post">
<table>
<tfoot>
<tr>
<td colspan="2">
<input type="submit" value="Save" />
</td>
</tr>
</tfoot>
<tbody>
<?php echo $userForm ?>
<?php echo $userInfoForm ?>
</tbody>
</table>
</form>

This is really annoying to work this way. You always have to instance 2 forms in the action and the templates. Wouldn’t it be better if we could merge the 2 forms? The answer is yes. And it’s pretty easy to do so in Symfony … too bad that it’s not documented on the Symfony website.

Here is how you do it:

1. UserForm.class.php

/**
* User form.
*
* @package    form
*/
class UserForm extends BaseUserForm {

public function configure() {
$this->mergeForm(new UserInfoForm(UserInfoPeer::retrieveByPK($this->getObject()->getId())));
}

/**
* Override the save method to save the merged user info form.
*/
public function save($con = null) {
parent::save();

$this->updateUserInfo();

return $this->object;
}

/**
* Updates the user info merged form.
*/
protected function updateUserInfo() {
// update user info
if (!is_null($userInfo = $this->getUserInfo())) {

$values = $this->getValues();
if ( $userInfo->isNew() ) {
$values['user_id'] = $this->object->getId();
}

$userInfo->fromArray($values, BasePeer::TYPE_FIELDNAME);

$userInfo->save();
}
}

/**
* Returns the user info object. If it does
* not exist return a new instance.
*
* @return UserInfo
*/
protected function getUserInfo() {

if (!$this->object->getUserInfo()) {
return new UserInfo();
}

return $this->object->getUserInfo();
}
}

2. actions.class.php

public function executeCreate($request) {
$this->form = new UserForm();
$this->setTemplate('edit');
}

public function executeEdit($request) {
$this->form = new UserForm(UserPeer::retrieveByPK($request->getParameter('id')));
}

public function executeUpdate($request) {

$this->forward404Unless($request->isMethod('post'));

$this->form = new UserForm(UserPeer::retrieveByPK($request->getParameter('id')));

$this->form->bind($request->getParameter($this->form->getName()));
if ($this->form->isValid()) {
$user = $this->form->save();
$this->redirect('user/edit?id='.$user->getId());
}

$this->setTemplate('edit');
}

3. editSuccess.php

<?php $user = $userForm->getObject(); ?>

<form action="<?php echo url_for('user/update'.(!$user->isNew() ? '?id='.$user->getId() : '')) ?>" method="post">
<table>
<tfoot>
<tr>
<td colspan="2">
<input type="submit" value="Save" />
</td>
</tr>
</tfoot>
<tbody>
<?php echo $userForm ?>
</tbody>
</table>
</form>

As you can see, it’s the UserForm that will handle all the business of the UserInfoForm. This is great because the code in the action and template will be much more lightened and if needed it can easily be reused somewhere else.

This was a simple example on how to merge 2 forms, but since it’s not documented on the symfony website, it took me some time to fully understand on how to make it work. Now you can do much more advanced operations.

symfony announced a new release in November 2009 and will be going from 1.2 to 1.3.

It’s wonderful that these guys are thinking ahead and keeping us up to date. Why is this important, you ask? Well would you invest in software that isn’t trying to evolve to a better version, to a more reliable version? I don’t think so. Like in our case: We started developing software in October 2007 and needed a part of the project to be PHP-based. The choice of framework wasn’t that easy but the great documentation and the future developments convinced us to use symphony. And we didn’t regret our choice for one minute. Fabien Potencier and his crew keep their promises to the developers and users.

I can quote him as they give good reasons why they should keep us up to date:

• the users will have time to learn all the great symfony 1.2 features compared to symfony 1.0
• the core team will have plenty of time to make symfony 1.3 rock solid
• the documentation team will have time to write even more tutorials and blog posts
• the plugin developers will have plenty of time to upgrade their plugins to 1.2 with confidence that their work will still be relevant for 1.3.

Great work guys, keep us up to date, in the mean time we’ll do just fine with the 1.2 version.

Last year, my team and I, needed to create a new web application. We decided to make use of a well known PHP framework called Symfony. Not because some say this is the best framework, but because …

• It is Enterprise Ready
• Has many plug-ins available
• It is Actively developed
• (most important) A great community and documentation
• Integrated Unit Testing

Although symfony has a good implemented MVC architecture with a lot of helpful functions, it is still very easy to make some design mistakes, like the DRY (Do not Repeat Yourself) principle. Fabien Potencier, lead developer of symfony, recently refactored an existing web project which he wrote down in the symfony blog.

If you work with symfony, you really should read this refactoring session because I’m pretty sure somewhere in your code you made the same mistake(s).

Call the expert: A refactoring story (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5)