Dave Dash

Versioning Django Models

2009-02-13T00:00:00-08:00

In symfony, versioning a model was not terribly difficult. I had my own specialized brute-force way of doing this.

In my experience it's been a lot easier to write python code than PHP code, so naturally I figured this would be an easy task. It was not. I suspect that it was not easy because I have a naive understanding of Django and my symfony knowledge was fairly well grounded.

I tried looking for a generic implementation of django model versioning, but failed. So I came up with a specific solution.

How I think of versions

For my app I chose to use a sparse versioning system. I'd have one interface for interacting with a model. For example, I have a Restaurant model and a RestaurantVersion model.

Restaurant would directly store immutable elements like name or rating or approved and it would encapsulate versioned elements like description by proxying to RestaurantVersion.

This means I only need to interface with one class and let the versioning happen behind the scenes.

The Django implementation of `RestaurantVersion`

RestaurantVersion held the data that I thought might suffer from corruption, and therefore require reversion. Therefore there's nothing surprising in this table:

The only thing of note is that I'm enforcing a 1:M relation between Restaurant and RestaurantVersion.

The Django implementation of `Restaurant`

Restaurant is where the magic happens. It needs to do a few things:

Do what a normal object does.
Proxy attributes to the corresponding attribute of a RestaurantVersion
Generate a new RestaurantVersion on demand.
(optional) Manage which version is "active".

I say "4" is optional because I don't do this myself. I built versioning into a few models because it was easier to do upfront than worry about it down the road.

Here's the code I use:

class Restaurant(models.Model):
    name           = models.CharField(max_length=765, blank=True)
    stripped_title = models.CharField(max_length=384, blank=True)
    approved       = models.IntegerField(null=True, blank=True)
    version        = models.ForeignKey(RestaurantVersion, related_name="the_restaurant")
    updated_at     = models.DateTimeField(auto_now=True)
    created_at     = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
    new_version    = None
    
    def save(self, force_insert=False, force_update=False):
        if not self.stripped_title:
            self.stripped_title = slugify(self.name)
        
        super(Restaurant, self).save(force_insert, force_update)
        if self.new_version:
            self.new_version.restaurant = self
            self.new_version.save()
            self.version = self.new_version
            super(Restaurant, self).save(force_insert, force_update)        
        
    def __setattr__(self, name, value):
        if name == 'description':
            self.get_new_version().description = value
        
        elif name == 'url':
            self.get_new_version().url = value
        
        else:
            object.__setattr__(self, name, value)

def __getattr__(self, name):
        try:
            if name == 'description':
                return self.version.description

elif name == 'url':
                return self.version.url
        except RestaurantVersion.DoesNotExist:
            return ''
            
        models.Model.__getattribute__(self, name)
    
    def get_new_version(self):
        if self.new_version == None:
            try:
                rv    = self.version
                rv.id = None
            except RestaurantVersion.DoesNotExist:
                rv = RestaurantVersion()
            
            self.new_version = rv

return self.new_version
            
    class Meta:
        db_table     = u'restaurant'

It's not rocket science, but it wasn't necessarily easy either. Let's look at requirements 2 and 4 in a bit more detail.

Proxy attributes to the corresponding `RestaurantVersion` attributes

Proxying attributes is a way of masking the whole versioning infrastructure from the developer. We do this with __getattr__ and __setattr__ methods.

The __getattr__ determins if you are looking for description or url attributes of a Restaurant. If you are then it uses the current RestaurantVersion's attribute.

__setattr__ is very similar, except since we're changing a versionable attribute we're going to make a request to a method, get_new_version(), which we will detail later. It does what it says, though, it gets the "new" RestaurantVersion of the Restaurant.

Generate a new `RestaurantVersion` on demand

As you can see from the above code, I am "auto-versioning". This is done mostly via get_new_version(). We also have to do a few tricks to make sure the bidirectional relationship gets maintained on save.

get_new_version() either returns the current "new version", a brand new "new version" or a "copy" of the current version.

The "copy" is done simply by setting the id attribute of the new version to None. Django takes care of assigning it a new id on save, thus preserving the old version.

Note that when we create a brand new RestaurantVersion, we don't immediately set it's restaurant attribute. That's because we haven't saved the current restaurant yet. It's a "chicken and the egg" problem that gets solved in our save() method:

We first save the Restaurant, then we save a new version if there is one. If we save a new version we want to update the Restaurant a second time. This ensures that there's a 1:1 relationship between Restaurant and the current RestaurantVersion and it also establishes a 1:M relationship between Restaurant and all RestaurantVersions.

Conclusion and Drawbacks

While, I think that this setup works in my particular situation, I feel like it has some major flaws.

The code is quite messy and very specific to this model. My goal was to take care of this quickly, not necessarily in a reusable manner. I also was not familiar enough with the Django model to create some sort of extension.

This way of versioning does not allow for versioned attributes to be set upon instantiation of the model:

r=Restaurant(description="Great place")

won't work. You'll have to do:

r=Restaurant()
r.description="Great place"

I figured this was acceptable.

Lastly I'm not entirely happy with having to explicitly save the Restaurant model twice, but I think my bidirectional relation requires this.

All in all this works in my particular situation. I'm hoping that this can be simplified. I'm curious to hear about other versioning schemes.

Mimic propel's update_at and created_at in Django models

2008-11-29T00:00:00-08:00

One "trick" that propel offers you is tables with fields created_at and updated_at.

The fields are self explanatory and within Propel you just define them and they just do their business.

To simulate this in Django just do:

updated_at = models.DateTimeField(auto_now=True)
created_at = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)

auto_now automatically sets a field to the current time, and auto_now_add only does this if the object is being added (not updated).

sfGuardUser -> django.contrib.auth

2008-11-20T00:00:00-08:00

If you find yourself moving from symfony to Django, here's how you sf_guard_user's user table to django.contrib.auth user table:

INSERT INTO 
    auth_user (id, username, password, is_active, last_login, date_joined)
SELECT 
    id, 
    username, 
    CONCAT(algorithm,'$', salt, '$', password), 
    1, 
    last_login, 
    created_at 
FROM sf_guard_user;

DROP TABLE sf_guard_user;

Luckily, django uses a similar salting and encryption strategy as symfony, so it's easy to go back and forth.

Why code rewrites are often coupled with redesigns

2008-08-13T00:00:00-07:00

I've done some rewrites of code, and they usually are coupled with redesigns.

Redesigns and rewrites are tricky. With web sites existing users tend to prefer incremental changes with each. Changing a design element or a feature are pretty much equivalent when its done incrementally.

Usually small changes are like surgery. You make a small change, you possibly announce it, and people look at it and usually say yes, this change is better. But mostly a small change can go unnoticed.

Tiny atomic changes are nice and they improve the product.

A rewrite of code however is a discrete change. They take forever. Second system and all that. They inevitably involve a redesign as well. They tend to be received with mixed reviews.

Generally a design of a site is grafted onto code. Sometimes by templating languages, sometimes in a tightly coupled system. In either case there's usually two options:

Make a faithful port of the design.
Redesign

The latter is generally preferred since this saves a lot of time. Generally there are bugs with a design, and there is a design backlog. A faithful port of the design would mean porting every broken HTML code, every non user-friendly element, etc.

Unfortunately this leaves web developers with a scary situation: Launching a product which changes peoples functional and UI experience.

The good thing is redesigns usually mean evolutionary leaps. Meaning, iterations can happen faster, both in design and functionality. We can easily please new customers, and we can quickly bring current customers up to speed.

In my spare time, I've been rewriting code that I wrote in symfony (PHP) into django (python). It's a tiresome long process that can easily kill a side project.

... and the new Delicious has landed

2008-07-31T00:00:00-07:00

Working at Delicious with the team has been a wonderful experience. This is probably the most fun I've had working on a project. I am really glad to work on a site that I use almost daily (and regularly if not daily before I joined) with a team that really cares about their product.

So without further ado...

Delicious 2.0

Here's the official announcement.

And here's some photos I took.

... and the new Delicious has landed

2008-07-31T00:00:00-07:00

So without further ado...

Delicious 2.0

Here's the official announcement.

And here's some photos I took.

nginx proxying to apache

2008-04-16T00:00:00-07:00

I gave up on fastcgi with NginX and django. Too many things just didn't work, so I decided to keep Apache, but lock it down and thrown NginX in the front to serve static content and to prevent max client issues.

I also applied a similar approach for symfony. Server configurations after the jump...

Apache

You should configure Apache as you would if you were serving directly from Apache. In otherwords, if you are already using Apache, you don't need to do anything different, save changing a port.

The one tweak I made to a standard configuration is to limit the allowed hosts to just the ones I want.

Here's my django app's apache.conf:

NameVirtualHost *
<VirtualHost *>
    ServerName onyxfoundation.org

    SetEnvIf X-Magic-Header ^secret$ let_me_in
    <Location "/">
            SetHandler python-program
            PythonHandler django.core.handlers.modpython
            SetEnv DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE onyx.settings
            PythonDebug On
            PythonPath "['/var/www/django/'] + sys.path"
            Order Deny,Allow
            Deny from all
            Allow from env=let_me_in
    </Location>
</VirtualHost>

Note the SetEnvIf it can be set however you want, I prefer to match a specific header that I send from nginx.

If you are using symfony, something like this will be more appropriate:

<VirtualHost *>
        ServerName reviewsby.us
        DocumentRoot /var/www/reviewsby.us/web
        DirectoryIndex index.php
       SetEnvIf X-Magic-Header ^secret$ let_me_in

        <Directory /var/www/reviewsby.us/web>
                Options Indexes FollowSymLinks

                RewriteEngine On

                RewriteRule ^$ index.html [QSA]
                RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [QSA]

                RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
                RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php [QSA]
                Order Deny,Allow
                Deny from all
                Allow from env=let_me_in
        </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

You'll also need to listen on a different port (preferably one that is not exposed to the outside world):

Listen 8080

NginX

Now NginX needs to be configured to do 2 things: 1. Serve all static content 2. Pass requests that need interpreting to django or symfony

The Django conf of Nginx is very easy:

server {
  listen   80;
  server_name onyxfoundation.org;

  location ^~ /static/ {
    alias        /var/www/django/onyx/static/;
    access_log   off;
    expires      30d;
  }

  location / {
    proxy_pass      http://127.0.0.1:8080/;
    proxy_redirect  off;

    proxy_set_header   Host             $host;
    proxy_set_header   X-Real-IP        $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-For  $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;

    proxy_set_header        X-Magic-Header "secret";
    client_max_body_size       10m;
    client_body_buffer_size    128k;

    proxy_connect_timeout      90;
    proxy_send_timeout         90;
    proxy_read_timeout         90;

    proxy_buffer_size          4k;
    proxy_buffers              4 32k;
    proxy_busy_buffers_size    64k;
    proxy_temp_file_write_size 64k;

  }
}

The settings are trivial. Everything that's /static gets served straight from NginX and the django application is served over Apache.

The same thing is a bit trickier in symfony:

server {
  listen   80;
  server_name  reviewsby.us;

  charset utf-8;

  location  /sf/ {
    alias  /var/www/reviewsby.us/lib/vendor/symfony/data/web/sf/;
  }
  location /css/ {
    alias /var/www/reviewsby.us/web/css/;
  }
  location /images/ {
    alias /var/www/reviewsby.us/web/images/;
  }

  location /js/ {
    alias /var/www/reviewsby.us/web/js/;
  }

  location / { 
    proxy_pass http://reviewsby.us:8080/;
    proxy_redirect off;

    proxy_set_header   Host             $host;
    proxy_set_header   X-Real-IP        $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-For  $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;

    proxy_set_header        X-Magic-Header "secret";
    client_max_body_size       10m;
    client_body_buffer_size    128k;

    proxy_connect_timeout      90;
    proxy_send_timeout         90;
    proxy_read_timeout         90;

    proxy_buffer_size          4k;
    proxy_buffers              4 32k;
    proxy_busy_buffers_size    64k;
    proxy_temp_file_write_size 64k;
  }
}

The added difficulty with symfony is specific to this app (and most default apps) since static content is split amongst the web root (/js, /css, /images, etc) versus the suggested django approach of throwing everything in /static. I now adopt this approach for symfony as well. It makes everything more flexible in the long-run.

Conclusion

If you've been hesitating about putting a reverse proxy in front of Apache, hopefully this can help you out. NginX is a lightweight fast server that can handle far more requests than Apache. By putting it on the front-lines you can give your app that extra inch it needs to keep churning out requests.

Let me know if this configuration works for you.

Optimization heuristics

2008-02-26T00:00:00-08:00

I decided to play version control private-eye today when my coworker mentioned that we make a system call to check the time several times per request on a few specific pages.

My analysis was we didn't need to have the calls but it had me thinking...

The micro-caching heuristic

One way of optimizing code is by calculating expensive operations once and storing them in a specific location. It's a micro-cache if you will of data.

One obvious example ends up being loops:

The inefficient example computes count($arr) n times where n is the size of the array $arr. The latter computes it once.

When we write and review code we should look out for loops and repeated code. These elements can be pulled out.

With some data lookups like system calls or queries we can apply a request-wide caching. In a symfony app, for example, we might need to calculate the time stamp in several locations throughout the code. Rather than calling time() throughout the code, we can create a site wide accessible attribute that has the same value.

For example, we can subclass sfContext and add a method called getTime() which runs time() once and only once per request and stores it internally. Whenever part of the app needs the time stamp, myContext::getInstance()->getTime() (or an equivalent shortcut) can be called. Of course, I haven't tested this, and myContext might not be the best place for this, but a similar strategy will work.

-dd

Redo The Web

2008-02-12T00:00:00-08:00

Sometimes it's nice to read a blog the "normal" way. You go to the site and just read the entries in reverse chronological order ... versus the RSS-crazy aggregated with everything else.

François Zaninotto's Redo The Web is a great blog for that if you do any work with symfony or web development in general. François wrote most of the documentation for symfony including The Definitive Guide to Symfony and his blog manages to keep that same easy-to-follow tips and tutorials.

Definitely check it out.

Keep a second web server around for luck...

2008-02-12T00:00:00-08:00

I had one of those mid-day "what's going on with my server" heart-atacks. I have a service that emails me when reviewsby.us is down. On my old server if it went down, I could just restart the server and it'd be back up. That was big old apache, running out of memory or something.

Reviewsby.us is a medium sized site. It gets a fair amount of traffic at a steady pace. Even in this case I decided I was in need for a new server, so I looked into nginx. It's fast and it can serve static content well and pass things to fastcgi. Joshua Schachter explains the proxy in front concept pretty well.

Back to my web developer heart attack...

Well this setup had been holding up for a better part of a month fairly well... then I saw that a lot of the pages just lagged. I restarted fastcgi and nginx (it was a fastcgi issue). Rather than try to debug something I couldn't, I quickly installed apache2 and setup the server the tried and tested way.

This all took place in a half an hour. Not the end of the world, but not elegant either. In the future, I'll revert to using nginx (possibly nginx+apache versus nginx+fastcgi) but I'll keep my other configurations around when all hell breaks loose.

the magic of django: get_callable

2008-02-08T00:00:00-08:00

symfony is an amazing framework simply because of the uphill battle it has with PHP. There's a lot of behind the scenes magic that ameliorates the frustrations one might have with PHPs lack of syntactical magic.

A lot of work is done to make sure certain things are autoloaded and that certain things behave the way you expect.

I hadn't had a chance to peek under Django's hood too much myself, but it appears that despite the inherent magic of python, there were some much needed additions. My savior for today was get_callable.

I have a very particular vision of interacting with OpenID. Basically I like to decouple as much of the OpenID interactions away from the inner workings of my web site. I do, however, want a hook where I can supply some of my own logic after OpenID has been verified.

It's roughly how I implimented the sfOpenIDPlugin. Luckily this time, I was able to rely on the OpenID 2.1 libraries from OpenIDEnabled.

I did ditch their example code, because I wanted a sexy package. The package isn't quite ready for primetime, but you can have a gander (and yes, I do welcome collaborators and am open to merging my work with the myriad of work that's out there).

Getting to the point

Anyway, get_callable is what allowed me to write my "hook" into my OpenID logic.

In my settings.py I defined:

OPENID_SUCCESS = 'myproject.myapp.views.openid_handler'

The way my OpenID library works, is it does it's business and when it verifies a url belongs to someone it then delivers he request to the OPENID_SUCCESS hook. Here's how:

if settings.OPENID_SUCCESS:
    view = get_callable(settings.OPENID_SUCCESS)
    return view(request, result)

get_callable works some python magic by splitting myproject.myapp.views.openid_handler into the module: myproject.myapp.views and the attribute openid_handler. It uses this to produce a callable object. In the example above I gave it parameters of request and result as they were required by my app.

sfGuardUser to django.contrib.auth.models.User

2008-02-07T00:00:00-08:00

Let's pretend that your assignment was to convert a symfony app that used sfGuardAuth to a django-based system. Wouldn't it be great if someone just gave you a bunch of SQL that you could use to convert the symfony sf_guard_user table to a django auth_user table?

Here you go:

REPLACE INTO 
  auth_user

SELECT 
  p.id AS id, 
  replace(username, 'http://', '') AS username,
  null AS first_name,
  null AS last_name,
  email,
  concat(algorithm,'$',salt,'$',password),
  0 as is_staff,
  1 as is_active,
  0 as is_superuser, 
  last_login,
  u.created_at as date_joined


FROM 
  `sf_guard_user` u, profile p 

WHERE
  p.userid = u.id

Why Django Templating is awesome and why I get smarty again

2008-02-01T00:00:00-08:00

I get Smarty thanks to django... yeah, it's weird.

Back to my original comment about templating, smarty really is trying to limit the scope of PHP in a good way. Too often I see a lot of heavy-lifting in the templates. It's so bad it makes my MVC'd brain explode.

Django templates are very limited, based on a philosophy of keeping view logic and only view logic in the templates.

This is what smart tries to do and it's a reasonable solution to the fact that PHP is a templating language with a kitchen sink. It's saying, okay... well let's treat PHP as a programming language, and keep Smarty as the template.

symfony of course says (well not really, or in any official capacity, but would you believe... frameworks talk to me), some PHP is view and some is model/controller. We'll suggest which ones are which, but really we're not getting in the way of making your life a living hell by sticking complicated business logic inline.

reusability

2008-01-30T00:00:00-08:00

[tags]django, plugins, apps, projects, symfony[/tags]

A project is a collection of settings for an instance of Django, including database configuration, Django-specific options, and application-specific settings.

The Django Book, Chapter 2:

A few people have been asking for more comparisons between symfony and Django. For me it's a great way of understanding Django and python as well as symfony and PHP.

Reusability is at the core of Django, not an afterthought. The only unique part of an app is the settings and the views. Everything else is an application that can exist independently of your app. It's nice and decoupled.

This wouldn't be impossible to do in symfony. Each module could be designed from the start as a plugin. Complete with its own set of models and default templates. The configuration of a project/app could then make the web app unique.

Right now the bulk of my symfony models are tightly coupled to their apps. It's a little confusing, but there isn't a direct correlation between Django projects, Django apps and symfony Projects, apps and modules. Each kind of overlaps one another.

Templating

2008-01-28T00:00:00-08:00

[tags]smarty, symfony, php, python, django[/tags]

I used to use the Smarty templating system quite heavily in my PHP apps. Then after switching over to symfony, I broke that habit.

PHP is a templating language for better or worse. Smarty was a way of saying that "well things could be easier", but that's against the grain of what PHP fundamentally is.

One frustration of PHP is this. A "pure" PHP file with no HTML looks like this:

PHP is an HTML templating system, by default everything in PHP is just stuff waiting to be sent untouched to the browser. So in essence, PHP web apps aren't really web apps... they are very complicated templates all talking to each other.

So you'll note in the above example, even a pure PHP file must begin with <?php, and signal that we're actually doing code. In fact, to prevent any unintended whitespace being sent to the browser, a PHP only file will by convention omit the closing ?>.

So my shiny new Django framework is a breath of fresh air. There's no <?py tags, it's all just python. And template files are explicitly template files parsed by a template engine built on top of a scripting language.

I can easily see PHP evolving into something similar one day. Where all PHP files are just PHP by default. It would be more in line with the way MVC development is going.

Templating

2008-01-28T00:00:00-08:00

[tags]smarty, symfony, php, python, django[/tags]

I used to use the Smarty templating system quite heavily in my PHP apps. Then after switching over to symfony, I broke that habit.

PHP is a templating language for better or worse. Smarty was a way of saying that "well things could be easier", but that's against the grain of what PHP fundamentally is.

One frustration of PHP is this. A "pure" PHP file with no HTML looks like this:

I can easily see PHP evolving into something similar one day. Where all PHP files are just PHP by default. It would be more in line with the way MVC development is going.

django experiment: day 2 templates, and that's it?

2008-01-28T00:00:00-08:00

[tags]django, symfony[/tags]

[Note: This really does have something to do with symfony.]

So I finished the tutorials on Django, but the Django tutorial is nothing compared to the Askeet Advent Calendar. Askeet was 24 one hour tutorials that go in depth to each nook and cranny of symfony, whereas I still feel like there's got to be more to Django.

I get Templating now, and I really like the flexibility offered in Django. The one major difference is the layout structure.

symfony has this nice structure of defining a general layout, and then all following templates automatically inherit from the default layout (unless otherwise specified). Django on the other hand requires you to explicitly extend other layouts and define regions within those layouts.

I like the symfony style because I inherit almost always from the general template.
The Django style however offers the flexibility of having subsections (which inherit from the base style) which you can inherit from. E.g. you may have a site which has 1. a blog and 2. a gallery. Both the blog and gallery sections share common elements from a main template, but all the pages within blog all have some unique bloggish features that the gallery lacks.

I've got a lot more to learn with Django, but I am enjoying it so far.

I...

~~still have to learn how to create templates.~~
~~want better understanding of the available field types.~~
want to find a good CMS package
want to know if there's the idea of environments in Django (like in symfony)
want to override .save() on my models
want to learn how to have self-referencing models (E.g. a hierarchical category)

YUI Autocomplete the easy way

2008-01-27T00:00:00-08:00

[tags]yui, autocomplete, javascript, jquery, symfony[/tags]

I'm redoing the UI for reviewsby.us and for the Javascript library I am standardizing on is YUI. The trick with YUI is that it's very verbose and very configurable.

Unfortunately to do simple things you have to write quite a lot. Which, coming from a jQuery background, is not what I'm used to. Yahoo provides a lot of useful examples for Auto Complete, I'll provide you with another (built in symfony, but anything in any server-side language will work). You'll need:

A data source
Some YUI
Some javascript of your own
And some HTML

We're building a tool to grab random items from our database and put them into our Autocomplete field. We also want to capture and id of these items and set them in our form.

Here we go...

Data Source

YUI gives you a lot of options with data sources. In many cases a remote script that returns JSON will be best. JSON is nice, compact, human debuggable and machine-readable.

We can make a searchJSON method that simply takes your database results and wraps them in to a formatted array and then using PHP's json_encode we can return a nice JSON object.

The ResultSet and Result keys are important as we'll see later.

We can serve this JSON method very easily in symfony like so:

Note that we use renderText rather than a separate ajaxListSuccess.php file.

YUI

There's some YUI code that you need. It's described well in the Autocomplete documentation.

Add the following to your page:

http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.4.1/build/yahoo-dom-event/yahoo-dom-event.js" type="text/javascript
http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.4.1/build/connection/connection-min.js type="text/javascript
http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.4.1/build/autocomplete/autocomplete-min.js
http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.4.1/build/autocomplete/assets/skins/sam/autocomplete.css

These are the bare YUI requirements to get Autocomplete working.

Javascript

There's a good deal of Javascript that you'll need to provide on your own. Here's what I wrote:

var MA = {};
    MA.autocomplete = function()
    {
      var e = YAHOO.util.Event;
      var w = YAHOO.widget;
  
      return {
        init: function()
        {
           e.onAvailable("myInput", this.fnHandler);
        },
        fnHandler: function()
        {
          var rDS = new w.DS_XHR("/ajax/object/list", ["ResultSet.Result","Title"]);

rDS.maxCacheEntries    = 60; 
          rDS.queryMatchContains = true;

var rAC = new w.AutoComplete("myInput","myACContainer", rDS);

rAC.formatResult = function(item, query) 
          {
            return item[1].Title;
          };
      
          rAC.forceSelection           = true; 
          rAC.allowBrowserAutocomplete = false; 
      
          rAC.itemSelectEvent.subscribe(
            function(sType, aArgs) 
            { 
              var data = aArgs[2];
              document.getElementById("object_id").value = aArgs[2][1]['Id'];
            }
          ); 
        },
    
      }
    }();

MA.autocomplete.init();

MA is my own private namespace. /ajax/object/list is the url of our data source we defined earlier. myInput, myACContainer and object_id are all IDs of elements in our DOM which we'll look at next.

HTML

Okay I went through this backwards, now we have the HTML.

This is all you need:

The End

That's it. It might seem like a lot, but YUI offers a tested working solution that works and is very customizable.

YUI Autocomplete the easy way

2008-01-27T00:00:00-08:00

[tags]yui, autocomplete, javascript, jquery, symfony[/tags]

I'm redoing the UI for reviewsby.us and for the Javascript library I am standardizing on is YUI. The trick with YUI is that it's very verbose and very configurable.

A data source
Some YUI
Some javascript of your own
And some HTML

We're building a tool to grab random items from our database and put them into our Autocomplete field. We also want to capture and id of these items and set them in our form.

Here we go...

Data Source

YUI gives you a lot of options with data sources. In many cases a remote script that returns JSON will be best. JSON is nice, compact, human debuggable and machine-readable.

We can make a searchJSON method that simply takes your database results and wraps them in to a formatted array and then using PHP's json_encode we can return a nice JSON object.

The ResultSet and Result keys are important as we'll see later.

We can serve this JSON method very easily in symfony like so:

Note that we use renderText rather than a separate ajaxListSuccess.php file.

YUI

There's some YUI code that you need. It's described well in the Autocomplete documentation.

Add the following to your page:

http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.4.1/build/yahoo-dom-event/yahoo-dom-event.js" type="text/javascript
http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.4.1/build/connection/connection-min.js type="text/javascript
http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.4.1/build/autocomplete/autocomplete-min.js
http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.4.1/build/autocomplete/assets/skins/sam/autocomplete.css

These are the bare YUI requirements to get Autocomplete working.

Javascript

There's a good deal of Javascript that you'll need to provide on your own. Here's what I wrote:

rDS.maxCacheEntries    = 60; 
          rDS.queryMatchContains = true;

var rAC = new w.AutoComplete("myInput","myACContainer", rDS);

MA.autocomplete.init();

HTML

Okay I went through this backwards, now we have the HTML.

This is all you need:

The End

That's it. It might seem like a lot, but YUI offers a tested working solution that works and is very customizable.

python: it begins

2008-01-26T00:00:00-08:00

[tags]php, python, symfony, frameworks, programming[/tags]

The problem I have with python, is I really like what I can do with it, and it makes me hate that I have to use PHP.

PHP works. I've used it for over 10 years without problem. My web development methodology was this: I want to do x, but I need to first learn y. Well one day y became PHP/FI and then PHP 3 and then PHP 4 and then PHP5. It was a natural progression.

I came from a (what was at the time) traditional C/C++/Java background and decided that PHP while amateurish was still a better solution for web development. A few years later I was proven right by companies like Yahoo! and Facebook.

I did have my issues, and I worked through them, symfony and other frameworks like it, have made PHP development so much better, but eventually you get let in on little secrets. Secrets like other scripting languages.

In the last year I dabbled with ruby, but decided I didn't want to look at rails. A few people pointed me in the direction of python and Django as an alternative to PHP alternatives. So I've spent time learning python.

Yesterday and today I gave myself a real project. I started hacking away at del.icio.us for a Winter Hack Day at Yahoo! I would write a few lines of code, and then realize that I can write it a little better a little cleaner using some neat little python constructs. It's enjoyable in the way that PHP is not.

It might just be a phase, but I sincerely doubt it. A lot of people I know who use python love it. Many have been using it for years (even while I secretly thought, "python? really?" Well, I'm starting to think they've been onto something. We'll see where I end up.

Fixing broken PATH_INFO

2008-01-23T00:00:00-08:00

[tags]php, cgi, path_info, nginx, symfony[/tags]

symfony and other applications rely on the server's PATH_INFO being set properly. According to NCSA:

The extra path information, as given by the client. In other words, scripts can be accessed by their virtual pathname, followed by extra information at the end of this path. The extra information is sent as `PATH_INFO`. This information *should be decoded by the server* if it comes from a URL before it is passed to the CGI script.

Unfortunately, I use a nonstandard server that doesn't natively support CGI, so everything sent to the FastCGI server is done so via parameters that are usually obtained from the HTTP request, but I can't figure out how to do a urldecode in my configuration.

So to workaround this I used the auto_prepend_file directive in php.ini. With OP code caching this shouldn't hurt too much:

auto_prepend_file = /var/www/pathinfofix.php

I then added the following script:

<?php 
$_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] = urldecode($_SERVER['ORIG_PATH_INFO']);

Voila, the PATH_INFO is in a format that symfony (and any other PHP script that depends on PATH_INFO) needs.

Fixing broken PATH_INFO

2008-01-23T00:00:00-08:00

[tags]php, cgi, path_info, nginx, symfony[/tags]

symfony and other applications rely on the server's PATH_INFO being set properly. According to NCSA:

The extra path information, as given by the client. In other words, scripts can be accessed by their virtual pathname, followed by extra information at the end of this path. The extra information is sent as `PATH_INFO`. This information *should be decoded by the server* if it comes from a URL before it is passed to the CGI script.

So to workaround this I used the auto_prepend_file directive in php.ini. With OP code caching this shouldn't hurt too much:

auto_prepend_file = /var/www/pathinfofix.php

I then added the following script:

<?php 
$_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] = urldecode($_SERVER['ORIG_PATH_INFO']);

Voila, the PATH_INFO is in a format that symfony (and any other PHP script that depends on PATH_INFO) needs.

Full Time Web Developers (willing to relocate to the Bay Area)

2008-01-22T00:00:00-08:00

[tags]jobs, yahoo, symfony[/tags]

If anybody (preferably with symfony experience) would like to work with me full time, please send me an email or leave a comment here.

I'm preferably looking for someone with symfony experience that's great with CSS and JS, especially with YUI.

-d

Full Time Web Developers (willing to relocate to the Bay Area)

2008-01-22T00:00:00-08:00

[tags]jobs, yahoo, symfony[/tags]

If anybody (preferably with symfony experience) would like to work with me full time, please send me an email or leave a comment here.

I'm preferably looking for someone with symfony experience that's great with CSS and JS, especially with YUI.

-d

ddAccessibleFormPlugin updated

2008-01-22T00:00:00-08:00

[tags] yui, jquery, javascript, forms, symfony, plugin [/tags]

I updated the symfony plugin for Pretty Accesible Forms available via svn. Feel free to read about it on trac.

Unfortunately jQuery the Javascript library I know and love wasn't helping me in the auto-complete department. While a very good plugin exists, it wasn't working as well as I'd like.

So I looked toward YUI. It's what we use at my work (duh) and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. So I rewrote the handful of jQuery scripts on reviewsby.us in YUI. It didn't take too long despite the verbose syntax.

Unfortunately that meant the accessible form plugin which I depend on needed to be updated as well. So now you've got a choice between jQuery and YUI.

nginx and symfony

2008-01-20T00:00:00-08:00

[tags]nginx, server, symfony[/tags]

I almost gave up on nginx and was going to settle on lighttpd or Apache, but I decided to check the symfony list and in minutes Kiril Angov (Kupokomapa) answered with a working nginx configuration. This is why I like the symfony community :)

Here's what works (Note: This requires a running FastCGI server):

server {
  listen       80;
  server_name  mysite.com *;
  root /var/www/mysite.com/web;
  index  index.php;

  charset utf-8;

  location / {
    # If the file exists as a static file serve it directly without
    # running all the other rewite tests on it
    if (-f $request_filename) {
      expires max; 
      break; 
    }

    if ($request_filename !~ "\.(js|htc|ico|gif|jpg|png|css)$") {
      rewrite ^(.*) /index.php last;
    }
  }

  location ~ \.php($|/) {
    set  $script     $uri;
    set  $path_info  "";

    if ($uri ~ "^(.+\.php)(/.+)") {
      set  $script     $1;
      set  $path_info  $2;
    }

    fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;

    include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;

    fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  /var/www/mysite.com/web$script;
    fastcgi_param  PATH_INFO        $path_info;
  }
}

This works in my Ubuntu instance of nginx. Other customziations to this might need to occur, but it's fairly solid so far.

nginx and symfony

2008-01-20T00:00:00-08:00

[tags]nginx, server, symfony[/tags]

Here's what works (Note: This requires a running FastCGI server):

server {
  listen       80;
  server_name  mysite.com *;
  root /var/www/mysite.com/web;
  index  index.php;

  charset utf-8;

  location / {
    # If the file exists as a static file serve it directly without
    # running all the other rewite tests on it
    if (-f $request_filename) {
      expires max; 
      break; 
    }

    if ($request_filename !~ "\.(js|htc|ico|gif|jpg|png|css)$") {
      rewrite ^(.*) /index.php last;
    }
  }

  location ~ \.php($|/) {
    set  $script     $uri;
    set  $path_info  "";

    if ($uri ~ "^(.+\.php)(/.+)") {
      set  $script     $1;
      set  $path_info  $2;
    }

    fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;

    include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;

    fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  /var/www/mysite.com/web$script;
    fastcgi_param  PATH_INFO        $path_info;
  }
}

This works in my Ubuntu instance of nginx. Other customziations to this might need to occur, but it's fairly solid so far.

Better than ORM Object Persistence

2007-12-20T00:00:00-08:00

After talking to people about the benefits and disadvantages of various ORMs... and reading up a little on non RDMBSs like Amazon SimpleDB I came to the realization that ORM is really a hack to get RDBMSs to work as a storage for objects.

I'm being liberal with the term hack. It really does work for a lot of situations, but it's not very elegant. The workflow is more or less this:

You create a database.
You create some objects
You define tables to store attributes of objects
You establish a mapping

There's a lot that goes into database definition. It would be nice to breakout from this line of thinking and do things a bit differently:

Create database
Save named (e.g. Person, Place, Log, Restaurant, Rating, Review) serialized objects to the database.

Let the database learn from the saving of the object how to define the type. In fact, it should be flexible and let us have mixmatched types, etc.

Let the database index everything, and keep the indexes up to date, but prioritize it based on usage. In other words if we usually query a database of Persons in order by a field called lastname, then make sure that index on lastname is always at hand. We should be able to query this data back out of storage based on how we stored it.

We should also be able to reach other objects in the database in a similar manner.

The key here is letting the database layer do the heavy-thinking about what to do with serialized data, versus having some middle layer take care of it.

...

so I might just be naive about data and databases. But if this idea is worthwhile and some database people can validate me, I'd be willing to work on it.

goto() Bash scripts for changing directories

2007-11-27T00:00:00-08:00

So one of the downsides to symfony is traversing the file system. Lately I've had to do this a lot so I decided to write some bash functions to make this easier. Here's one I call goto which works as such:

`goto` filename.ext

Feel free to make this better, or if there exists a built-in that I know nothing about tell me about it.

Here's the function:

goto () {
  FILE=`find . -iname $1|head -1`
  DIR=`dirname $FILE`
  cd $DIR
}

Update

I changed the function to take care of this syntax:

goto default/../actions.class.php (amongst other things) will now find app/frontend/modules/default/actions:

goto () {
    FORMATTED_STR=`echo $1|sed -e 's|/../|/*/|g'`
    FILE=`find . -ipath *${FORMATTED_STR}*|head -1`
    DIR=`dirname $FILE`
    cd $DIR
}

goto() Bash scripts for changing directories

2007-11-27T00:00:00-08:00

`goto` filename.ext

Feel free to make this better, or if there exists a built-in that I know nothing about tell me about it.

Here's the function:

goto () {
  FILE=`find . -iname $1|head -1`
  DIR=`dirname $FILE`
  cd $DIR
}

Update

I changed the function to take care of this syntax:

goto default/../actions.class.php (amongst other things) will now find app/frontend/modules/default/actions:

goto () {
    FORMATTED_STR=`echo $1|sed -e 's|/../|/*/|g'`
    FILE=`find . -ipath *${FORMATTED_STR}*|head -1`
    DIR=`dirname $FILE`
    cd $DIR
}

ddJQueryCalendarPlugin plugin for symfony released

2007-09-20T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]JQuery, jq, javascript, js, JQuery Calendar, calendar, symfony, plugin[/tags]

I released a new symfony plugin today for the jQuery Calendar available via svn. Feel free to read about it on trac. This adds a clever calendar widget that can trigger events. Very handy for viewing an events calendar.

I'll publish a link to this plugin in action in the following weeks. Enjoy.

ddJQueryCalendarPlugin plugin for symfony released

2007-09-20T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]JQuery, jq, javascript, js, JQuery Calendar, calendar, symfony, plugin[/tags]

I'll publish a link to this plugin in action in the following weeks. Enjoy.

symfonyCamp

2007-09-11T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]symfony, symfonyCamp, sensio, dop, zend search lucene, zsl[/tags]

Well Katie and I are back from symfonyCamp and it was great. I opted to socialize on the business day, except to hear Fabien Potencier's brief overview of what's to come in symfony 1.1/2.0.

I personally know only a handful of adept symfony developers, so going to camp it was nice to see 50 people or so who knew symfony to varying degrees. I am a fan of the small successes, such as Fabian Lange's historical reenactment site which paid the way for two developers to attend the conference.

One of the most interesting talks to hear was Fabien's overview of symfony 2.0. It was a 12-step process from going to vanilla PHP to building a strong framework in about 200 lines. A leaner more robust symfony sounds very appealing, it's also what appeals to me about being a developer. Every developer builds off of existing technologies and is able to create something great. I frequently have to dig into the symfony core code to see how things "really" work and everything is simple, easy to follow building blocks. Effectively giving us a nice framework. symfony 2.0 seems to be a leaner more flexible framework.

Later I spoke on Zend Search Lucene as well as Ajax. Both are somewhat difficult to speak on for 45 minutes. Zend Search Lucene really only takes 15 minutes to explain, and maybe just as long to implement. Sure it can be tweaked quite a bit, but it's straightforward - that's the point.

Ajax on the other hand is hard to explain in terms of symfony. Sure there's a helper layer, but the Javascript layer is very independent of the PHP layer. Anything can support Ajax. So I tried to cover not just the standard helpers, but show a few demos and how easy it is with the helper system. Unfortunately I don't really code this way, I try to use UJS and the jQuery plugins with new work, but that would move the talk to a more advanced topic.

The next day we ended up cleaning up the symfony project. We split into teams to take care of some house-work. Some people cleaned up the wiki. Some cleaned up tickets, some wrote new modules for the site. Our team worked on plugins and it went rather well. We closed a number of tickets, created a good deal of patches (which I have yet to apply), but overall the plugins are all a bit better.

Overall everything was great. Dutch Open Projects was great, especially Stefan for arranging so much, Guido for making sure everyone was comfortable and Floris for the great food.

You can also read Fabien's overview of the camp.

symfonyCamp

2007-09-11T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]symfony, symfonyCamp, sensio, dop, zend search lucene, zsl[/tags]

Well Katie and I are back from symfonyCamp and it was great. I opted to socialize on the business day, except to hear Fabien Potencier's brief overview of what's to come in symfony 1.1/2.0.

Overall everything was great. Dutch Open Projects was great, especially Stefan for arranging so much, Guido for making sure everyone was comfortable and Floris for the great food.

You can also read Fabien's overview of the camp.

resetting CSS list items

2007-09-01T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]css, symfony, blueprint, yui[/tags]

Call me a purist, but I really believe that Blueprint should go the extra step as YUI (note: I'm a YUI CSS user dabbling in Blueprint) does and reset list items as well. It's all about how you use your elements and what you consider as resetting, but I feel that a bullet added to a list is something that should be removed in a proper reset.css file.

Different browsers are going to have their own ways of rendering bullets and really the developer should explicitly inform us how they would like their lists rendered.

Personally, most of my list items are lists of links as in menus, which require no bullets usually. This is probably the source of my bias.

sfBlueprintPlugin: Train of thought development

2007-08-30T00:00:00-07:00

I've been creating some dummy projects for my presentations at SymfonyCamp and decided now would be a good time to learn using the Blueprint CSS framework. It's a bit different than YUI which I've been using heavily, but it has some potential.

Of course, instead of just downloading the framework, I made a plugin for symfony. It's not much yet, but eventually I'll throw in some helpers.

Enjoy!

[tags]css, symfony, blueprint, plugins, symfony camp, camp, yui[/tags]

sfBlueprintPlugin: Train of thought development

2007-08-30T00:00:00-07:00

Of course, instead of just downloading the framework, I made a plugin for symfony. It's not much yet, but eventually I'll throw in some helpers.

Enjoy!

[tags]css, symfony, blueprint, plugins, symfony camp, camp, yui[/tags]

Affordable IM/Phone-based consulting

2007-08-20T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]symfony, spindrop, services, consulting[/tags]

I'm now available for chat-based consulting. If you are stuck in a rut and find yourself spending a lot of time in chat rooms or on forums to no avail trying to understand symfony, php, or javascript (AJAX), this is the solution for you.

I can give you expert help on best practices and get you out of snags quickly. The types of problems I can help you solve are:

symfony/PHP white-screens-of-death
other 404/500 errors
symfony exceptions
best practices
apache configuration
AJAX/Javascript questions

I'm available by chat, or email or phone during pre-arranged times. I can even remote into your server via VNC and show you (literally) how to fix your problems.

If you're interested in this service please contact me.

Affordable IM/Phone-based consulting

2007-08-20T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]symfony, spindrop, services, consulting[/tags]

I can give you expert help on best practices and get you out of snags quickly. The types of problems I can help you solve are:

symfony/PHP white-screens-of-death
other 404/500 errors
symfony exceptions
best practices
apache configuration
AJAX/Javascript questions

I'm available by chat, or email or phone during pre-arranged times. I can even remote into your server via VNC and show you (literally) how to fix your problems.

If you're interested in this service please contact me.

Symfony Camp: Ajax and Zend, what would you like to know?

2007-08-16T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]symfonyCamp, symfony, netherlands, ajax, zend search lucene, zsl, jquery[/tags]

I've been asked to speak at SymfonyCamp (symfony['camp']) next month (you should all go if you can) and I thought I'd present as well as I could on Ajax and the Zend Framework Bridge (including Zend Search Lucene).

If you're attending the camp and/or would like to hear about these topics please let me know any specific questions you might have about "symfony and Ajax" and "symfony and Zend" and I'll try to address them in my presentations.

If you are unable to go fear not, I'll try to post my notes on this site.

Symfony Camp: Ajax and Zend, what would you like to know?

2007-08-16T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]symfonyCamp, symfony, netherlands, ajax, zend search lucene, zsl, jquery[/tags]

If you are unable to go fear not, I'll try to post my notes on this site.

symfony and the .htaccess file

2007-08-15T00:00:00-07:00

One performance boost that can be garnered from a symfony app (or any app for that matter) is disabling .htaccess. .htaccess does not need to be parsed on each visit to your app. Disabling .htaccess is trivial in your VirtualHost or another relevant part of your apache configuration place:

AllowOverride None

symfony does require the Rewrite recipes in .htaccess to properly give you pretty urls, so place those statements right after AllowOverride None.

In my specific case I used this:

<VirtualHost *>
  ServerName contest.spindrop.sf
  DocumentRoot    /Users/davedash/Sites/spindrop/web/
  DirectoryIndex  frontend_dev.php

  <Directory /Users/davedash/Sites/spindrop/web/>
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
    AllowOverride None
    <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
      RewriteEngine On

      RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} \..+$
      RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.html$
      RewriteRule .* - [L]

      RewriteRule ^$ index.html [QSA]
      RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [QSA]
      RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

      RewriteRule ^(.*)$ frontend_dev.php [QSA,L]
    </IfModule>
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Now all these rewriting rules are loaded when the server is restarted and the .htaccess is not examined upon each request.

symfony + mod_rewrite: moving smoothly from development to production environments

2007-08-14T00:00:00-07:00

I think a common problem for some symfony developers that aren't too familiar with Apache's Mod Rewrite is when they move from a development environment that uses an explicit controller (e.g. frontend_dev.php is requested from the server explicitly) to their production app which implicitly calls index.php (e.g. '/' or some other route is passed to index.php) things stop working.

This is probably a mod_rewrite issue. Mod Rewrite handles implicitly directing (almost) all traffic to index.php in a symfony application.

The default .htaccess for symfony is defined as such:

Options +FollowSymLinks +ExecCGI

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine On

  # uncomment the following line, if you are having trouble
  # getting no_script_name to work
  #RewriteBase /

  # we skip all files with .something
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} \..+$
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.html$
  RewriteRule .* - [L]

  # we check if the .html version is here (caching)
  RewriteRule ^$ index.html [QSA]
  RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [QSA]
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

  # no, so we redirect to our front web controller
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php [QSA,L]
</IfModule>

# big crash from our front web controller
ErrorDocument 500 "<h2>Application error</h2>symfony application failed to start properly"

As you can see if the mod_rewrite.c module is not enabled this will not work.

Luckily most packages of Apache have the module, it just needs to be enabled by uncommenting the right line of .htaccess:

LoadModule rewrite_module     libexec/httpd/mod_rewrite.so

Restarting apache should give you full rewrite control. This is fairly basic Apache administration, but for a lot of people symfony is their first foray into URL rewriting.

FBML and CSS background images

2007-08-11T00:00:00-07:00

I've been tediously building out the new reviewsby.us app for Facebook and I ran into some problem when I tried to embed this CSS:

The CSS worked fine, just now background image. The fix is mentioned in this post which is to repeat the background statement:

Voila, it works. Hopefully this hack won't be necessary in later versions of the Platform.

FBML and embedded CMS

2007-08-04T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]fbml, css, reviewsby.us, partials, symfony, sfFacebookPlatformPlugin[/tags]

One problem of going the FBML route¹ is CSS styles. You can't link to external style sheets so you need to embed everything.

I took the liberty of using a partial that contains all the useful CSS that I use in our app. Now we can just embed it in our layout by doing:

<?php include_partial('sfFacebook/css');?>

The following classes are useful:

.app_content is the div surrounding the main content of the page. It gives the canvas some padding (actually it gives itself some margin as not to butt-up against the canvas.
.box this defines the classic facebook box with a dark blue border at the top and with headers that have the lighter blue background and dark blue text.
.box .header the header for the box described above. Use an h2 for the title.
.box .content the main content section of a box, has a bit of padding.

I'm not completely convinced that the reviewsby.us app for facebook should be using FBML. ↩

FBML and embedded CMS

2007-08-04T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]fbml, css, reviewsby.us, partials, symfony, sfFacebookPlatformPlugin[/tags]

One problem of going the FBML route¹ is CSS styles. You can't link to external style sheets so you need to embed everything.

I took the liberty of using a partial that contains all the useful CSS that I use in our app. Now we can just embed it in our layout by doing:

<?php include_partial('sfFacebook/css');?>

The following classes are useful:

.app_content is the div surrounding the main content of the page. It gives the canvas some padding (actually it gives itself some margin as not to butt-up against the canvas.
.box this defines the classic facebook box with a dark blue border at the top and with headers that have the lighter blue background and dark blue text.
.box .header the header for the box described above. Use an h2 for the title.
.box .content the main content section of a box, has a bit of padding.

I'm not completely convinced that the reviewsby.us app for facebook should be using FBML. ↩

Facebook Markup Language: the Dashboard and Action links

2007-07-25T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]facebook, fbml, apps, reviewsby.us, symfony, sfFacebookPlatformPlugin, plugins[/tags]

Facebook has the concept of the dashboard:

In case the documentation isn't clear, these are where the top buttons for your app go.

I created the FBMLHelper to help you write links from symfony to facebook.

The dashboard itself is easy to create:

<fb:dashboard>
</fb:dashboard>

The links are fairly simple, but if you use symfony... we like helpers...

So the FBMLHelper has an fb_action method which is similar to link_to:

<?php echo fb_action('My Dining', '@homepage') ?>

Will actually render as:

<a href="http://apps.facebook.com/reviewsbyus/">My Dining</a>

Provided the app_facebook_canvas_url is set to your canvas url (for example, our's is http://apps.facebook.com/reviewsbyus/).

This helper takes care of routing and rewriting the URL to something that will work within Facebook's canvas.

... so start writing some apps. This plugin will be developed further and I'll try to publish tutorials whenever possible.

Facebook Markup Language: the Dashboard and Action links

2007-07-25T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]facebook, fbml, apps, reviewsby.us, symfony, sfFacebookPlatformPlugin, plugins[/tags]

Facebook has the concept of the dashboard:

In case the documentation isn't clear, these are where the top buttons for your app go.

I created the FBMLHelper to help you write links from symfony to facebook.

The dashboard itself is easy to create:

<fb:dashboard>
</fb:dashboard>

The links are fairly simple, but if you use symfony... we like helpers...

So the FBMLHelper has an fb_action method which is similar to link_to:

<?php echo fb_action('My Dining', '@homepage') ?>

Will actually render as:

<a href="http://apps.facebook.com/reviewsbyus/">My Dining</a>

Provided the app_facebook_canvas_url is set to your canvas url (for example, our's is http://apps.facebook.com/reviewsbyus/).

This helper takes care of routing and rewriting the URL to something that will work within Facebook's canvas.

... so start writing some apps. This plugin will be developed further and I'll try to publish tutorials whenever possible.

Dynamically adjusting your page title in symfony

2007-07-18T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]view, view.yml, symfony, reviewsby.us, title, seo[/tags]

A lot of the content on reviewsBy.us and other sites we make using symfony have dynamic content. We try to have our page titles reflect the content by prepending the name of the specific restaurant, document or menu item before the site name.

To do this we use a method called prependTitle. I define this in a file called myActions.class.php which almost all of my actions subclass in my projects. This way I can enhance all the actions simply by adjusting the common ancestor, myActions:

The page title isn't stored anywhere, so we have to put it in app.yml:

app:
  title: reviewsby.us

Voila!

Dynamically adjusting your page title in symfony

2007-07-18T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]view, view.yml, symfony, reviewsby.us, title, seo[/tags]

The page title isn't stored anywhere, so we have to put it in app.yml:

app:
  title: reviewsby.us

Voila!

doctine and getState()

2007-07-10T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]doctrine, php, symfony, sfDoctrine, database,errors[/tags]

I tend to have models with a field called state. Doctrine offers a few ways of getting to the state field:

$obj->get('state');
$obj['state'];

$obj->getState() however conflicts with Doctrine_Record::getState() from which all objects inherit. Use one of the above alternatives.

Using sfDoctrine to match allowed email domains

2007-07-09T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]php, propel, doctrine, validators, symfony, optiopt, startup[/tags]

I'm a co-founder at an online finance web site and I'm in charge with building out the site. Our rollout strategy is to let a a handful of companies at a time, so we're limiting registration based on your company's email address.

I decided to follow the bandwagon and use PHP Doctrine. We'll define two objects, Company and CompanyDomain:

Company:
  tableName: company
  columns:
    name: {type: string(100)}
    created_at: timestamp
    updated_at: timestamp

CompanyDomain:
  tableName: company_domain
  columns:
    company_id:
      foreignClass: Company
      cascadeDelete: true
    pattern: {type: string(100)}

Where a CompanyDomain represents a domain name for a company. E.g. Motorola might have both motorola.com and mot.com.

We can validate a signup form and see if we've got an email address from a domain we recognize. I like using the validationXXX methods in an action class for specific validation. I made one called validateSignup:

public function validateSignup()
{
    if ($this->isPost())
    {
        $email = $this->getRequestParameter('company_email');
        if (!$company = CompanyTable::match($email))
        {
            $this->getRequest()->setError('company_email', 'Your work email doesn\'t appear to belong to any of the registered companies.');
            return false;
        }
        return true;
    }
}

In our CompanyTable we create a static function CompanyTable::match:

static public function match($email)
{
    $company = Doctrine_Query::create()->from('Company c, c.CompanyDomains d')->where('? LIKE CONCAT(\'%\', pattern)', $email)->execute()->getFirst();

    return $company;
}

Note that we transparently do a join in the ->from() statement. If there's a match we get a company object (which we can associate with the new user) otherwise we get a null object.

Enjoy.

Using sfDoctrine to match allowed email domains

2007-07-09T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]php, propel, doctrine, validators, symfony, optiopt, startup[/tags]

I decided to follow the bandwagon and use PHP Doctrine. We'll define two objects, Company and CompanyDomain:

Company:
  tableName: company
  columns:
    name: {type: string(100)}
    created_at: timestamp
    updated_at: timestamp

CompanyDomain:
  tableName: company_domain
  columns:
    company_id:
      foreignClass: Company
      cascadeDelete: true
    pattern: {type: string(100)}

Where a CompanyDomain represents a domain name for a company. E.g. Motorola might have both motorola.com and mot.com.

public function validateSignup()
{
    if ($this->isPost())
    {
        $email = $this->getRequestParameter('company_email');
        if (!$company = CompanyTable::match($email))
        {
            $this->getRequest()->setError('company_email', 'Your work email doesn\'t appear to belong to any of the registered companies.');
            return false;
        }
        return true;
    }
}

In our CompanyTable we create a static function CompanyTable::match:

static public function match($email)
{
    $company = Doctrine_Query::create()->from('Company c, c.CompanyDomains d')->where('? LIKE CONCAT(\'%\', pattern)', $email)->execute()->getFirst();

    return $company;
}

Note that we transparently do a join in the ->from() statement. If there's a match we get a company object (which we can associate with the new user) otherwise we get a null object.

Enjoy.

Saving a file to a database using symfony and doctrine

2007-07-07T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]symfony, doctrine, database, uploads, wordpress, fixme[/tags]

I like to save content uploaded by website visitors to a database versus the file system. It makes it easy having the data all in one spot.

I tend to overcomplicate this process, so I wanted to write down the important steps:

In the template set multipart=true for the form. If you're using symfony helpers you can do this via:
```
 form_tag('@action', 'multipart=true')
```

Extract the binary data you want to store in the database in your action:

 $path = $this->getRequest()->getFilePath('my_file');
 $size = $this->getRequest()->getFileSize('my_file');
 $type = $this->getRequest()->getFileType('my_file');    
 $data = fread(f_open($path, "r"), $size);

 $myObject              = new MyObject();
 $myObject['file_data'] = $data;
 $myObject['file_size'] = $size;
 $myObject['mime_type'] = $type;
 $myObject->save();

Note: Wordpress is garbage so f_open should not have an underscore... what to do...

At least that's how we role with Doctrine. Note, Doctrine syntax is changing, and this may not be the most efficient way to create a new Doctrine Record in your application.

Saving a file to a database using symfony and doctrine

2007-07-07T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]symfony, doctrine, database, uploads, wordpress, fixme[/tags]

I like to save content uploaded by website visitors to a database versus the file system. It makes it easy having the data all in one spot.

I tend to overcomplicate this process, so I wanted to write down the important steps:

In the template set multipart=true for the form. If you're using symfony helpers you can do this via:
```
 form_tag('@action', 'multipart=true')
```

Extract the binary data you want to store in the database in your action:

 $path = $this->getRequest()->getFilePath('my_file');
 $size = $this->getRequest()->getFileSize('my_file');
 $type = $this->getRequest()->getFileType('my_file');    
 $data = fread(f_open($path, "r"), $size);

 $myObject              = new MyObject();
 $myObject['file_data'] = $data;
 $myObject['file_size'] = $size;
 $myObject['mime_type'] = $type;
 $myObject->save();

Note: Wordpress is garbage so f_open should not have an underscore... what to do...

At least that's how we role with Doctrine. Note, Doctrine syntax is changing, and this may not be the most efficient way to create a new Doctrine Record in your application.

Firebug Lite and symfony

2007-06-02T00:00:00-07:00

I wrote a symfony plugin to enable the Firebug Lite javascript in your symfony app (in much the same way that web_debug works).

Firebug, Gmail Manager and Adblock are all plugins I use regularly in Firefox. However, I've been getting tired of Firefox's hunger for my resources, so I want to be as browser independent as possible. So this plugin allows me (and you) to embed some of the debugging functionality of Firebug in other browsers.

Firebug Lite and symfony

2007-06-02T00:00:00-07:00

I wrote a symfony plugin to enable the Firebug Lite javascript in your symfony app (in much the same way that web_debug works).

Boosting terms in Zend Search Lucene

2007-05-29T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]Zend, Zend Search Lucene, Search, Lucene, php, symfony, zsl[/tags]

Boosting terms — some fields are better than others

Lucene supports boosting or weighting terms. For example, if I search for members of a web site, and I type in Dash, I want people with the name Dash to take precendence over somebody who has a hobby of running the 50-yard Dash.

If we look at our generateZSLDocument() method we defined we just need to adjust a few lines:

Should be turned into:

This is pretty straight forward way to add weight (1.5 times the weight of a normal term) and you can customize it to the needs of your site.

Boosting terms in Zend Search Lucene

2007-05-29T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]Zend, Zend Search Lucene, Search, Lucene, php, symfony, zsl[/tags]

Boosting terms — some fields are better than others

If we look at our generateZSLDocument() method we defined we just need to adjust a few lines:

Should be turned into:

This is pretty straight forward way to add weight (1.5 times the weight of a normal term) and you can customize it to the needs of your site.

Finding things using Zend Search Lucene in symfony

2007-05-23T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]Zend, Zend Search Lucene, Search, Lucene, php, symfony, zsl[/tags]

This is part of an on going series about the Zend Search Lucene libraries and symfony. We'll pretty everything up when we're done =)

We now know how to manipulate the index via our model classes. But let's actually do something useful with our search engine... let's search!

[tags]Zend, Zend Search Lucene, Search, Lucene, php, symfony, zsl[/tags]

At the time of this writing we're dealing with Propel which uses Peer classes which are meant for dealing with multiple objects¹. This is the perfect place for a ::search() method. In otherwords, UserPeer::search('dave'); should query Lucene for users matching "dave". Let's make that happen:

What we're doing is retrieving our Lucene index. Somewhere between tutorials we wrote this Peer function to handle that:

If our index is missing we'll conveniently create it on the fly. We then use the Zend Search Lucene API to retrieve the matching hits in this index and then use some Propel trickery to retrieve by an array of primary keys.

It's now simple to use ::search() functions in the same manner as you use ::doSelect().

At this point you should be able to create a basic symfony app that can utilize a Lucene index.

The examples refer to using Propel, but it's trivial to adapt this to sfDoctrine ↩

Finding things using Zend Search Lucene in symfony

2007-05-23T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]Zend, Zend Search Lucene, Search, Lucene, php, symfony, zsl[/tags]

This is part of an on going series about the Zend Search Lucene libraries and symfony. We'll pretty everything up when we're done =)

We now know how to manipulate the index via our model classes. But let's actually do something useful with our search engine... let's search!

[tags]Zend, Zend Search Lucene, Search, Lucene, php, symfony, zsl[/tags]

What we're doing is retrieving our Lucene index. Somewhere between tutorials we wrote this Peer function to handle that:

It's now simple to use ::search() functions in the same manner as you use ::doSelect().

At this point you should be able to create a basic symfony app that can utilize a Lucene index.

The examples refer to using Propel, but it's trivial to adapt this to sfDoctrine ↩

Debugging yaml configuration with the symfony web debugger

2007-05-21T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]symfony, yaml, configuration, web debug, debug[/tags] There's no doubt that yaml configuration files in symfony can be troublesome to debug.

The symfony web debugger comes to the rescue.

Let's say you're app.yml has the following:

app:
  admin:
    email: me@example.com

In your development environment you can look at click on "vars & config" and under settings see all the sfConfig::getable variables. You'll find the above listed as:

app_admin_email: me@example.com

This technique is very handy when trying to figure out what key you need to use in sfConfig::get().

Debugging yaml configuration with the symfony web debugger

2007-05-21T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]symfony, yaml, configuration, web debug, debug[/tags] There's no doubt that yaml configuration files in symfony can be troublesome to debug.

The symfony web debugger comes to the rescue.

Let's say you're app.yml has the following:

app:
  admin:
    email: me@example.com

In your development environment you can look at click on "vars & config" and under settings see all the sfConfig::getable variables. You'll find the above listed as:

app_admin_email: me@example.com

This technique is very handy when trying to figure out what key you need to use in sfConfig::get().

Adventures in stupidity... strip_comments and SF_DEBUG

2007-05-07T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]symfony, media temple, fast cgi, anomalies, SNAFU, php, configuration[tags]

Often I run into SNAFUs... generally these are minimized by clever frameworks, design patterns, normalizers, etc. Lately I've been working with a Mark Quezada on a client hosted at Media Temple on a dedicated virtual server.

Unfortunately some combination of FastCGI, their build of PHP and symfony just wasn't working. I beat my head for a few hours and we found out that setting SF_DEBUG to true would get rid of the problem, or more specifically setting strip_comments to off would fix this.

Without getting my hands too dirty, something in the way that sfToolkit::stripComments strips comments (and I don't know when this happens, but I imagine it happens for compiling and caching parts of the code) doesn't jive well with our servers configuration.

Needless to say, I very much prefer having full control on as many layers of "LAMP" as possible to ensure that what I want done is getting done, even if it means compiling Apache and PHP by hand.

Creating, Updating, Deleting documents in a Lucene Index with symfony

2007-04-24T00:00:00-07:00

Previously we covered an all-at-once approach to indexing objects in your symfony app. But for some reason, people find the need to allow users to sign up, or change their email addresses and then all of a sudden our wonderful Lucene index is out of date.

Here lies the strength of using Zend Search Lucene in your app, you can now get the flexibility of interacting with a Lucene index, no matter how it was created and add, update and delete documents to it.

The last thing you want to do is have a cron job in charge of making sure your index is always up to date by reindexing regularly. This is an inelegant and inefficient process.

A smarter method would be to trigger an update of the index each time you update your database. Luckily the ORM layer allows us to do this using objects (in our case Propel objects).

If we look at our user example from before, we did set ourselves up to easily do this using our User::generateZSLDocument() function, which did most of the heavy lifting.

We can make a few small changes to the User class:

We have an attribute called $reindex. When it is false we don't need to worry about the index. When something significant changes, like an update to your name or email address, then we set $reindex to true. Then when we save with an overridden save method:

Now we've got the exact same data that we created during our original indexing. This handled creating and updating object, but we miss updating the index when deleting objects.

Luckily we already made a function User::removeFromIndex() to remove any related documents from the index, so our delete function can be pretty simple:

Creating, Updating, Deleting documents in a Lucene Index with symfony

2007-04-24T00:00:00-07:00

The last thing you want to do is have a cron job in charge of making sure your index is always up to date by reindexing regularly. This is an inelegant and inefficient process.

A smarter method would be to trigger an update of the index each time you update your database. Luckily the ORM layer allows us to do this using objects (in our case Propel objects).

If we look at our user example from before, we did set ourselves up to easily do this using our User::generateZSLDocument() function, which did most of the heavy lifting.

We can make a few small changes to the User class:

Now we've got the exact same data that we created during our original indexing. This handled creating and updating object, but we miss updating the index when deleting objects.

Luckily we already made a function User::removeFromIndex() to remove any related documents from the index, so our delete function can be pretty simple:

The Lucene Search Index and symfony

2007-04-23T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]Zend, Zend Search Lucene, Search, Lucene, php, symfony, zsl, index[/tags]

This article is meant to followup sfZendPlugin where we learn a newer way of obtaining the Zend Framework.

In this tutorial we're going to delve into the Lucene index. Zend Search Lucene relies on building a Lucene index. This is a directory that contains files that can be indexed and queried by Lucene or other ports. In our example we'll be creating a search for user profiles.

We'll want to store in our app.yml the precise location of this index file so we can refer to it in our app¹.

Here's an example:

all:
  search:
    user_index: /tmp/myapp.user.lucene.index

Now when we need to refer to the index we can do sfConfig::get('app_search_user_index').

Index Something

Let's try a user search where we can find a user by their name or email address. It's fairly simple to accomplish, and hardly requires the use of ZSL, but by using ZSL we can easily extend it to do a full-text search of a user's profile or any other textual data.

Each "thing" stored in the index is a Lucene "document". Each document then consists of several "fields" (Zend_Search_Lucene_Field objects). In our example, each document will be an individual user and the fields will be relevant attributes of the user (username, first name, last name, email, the text of their profile).

Initially we'll want to populate our index. We may also want to regularly reindex all the users at once to optimize the search performance. Since reindexing involves multiple users it would make sense to have a static reindex method in our UserPeer class².

Very simply, we're creating a new index, getting all the users, adding a document to the index and then committing the index (to disk). You might have noticed that there's a strange function, User::generateZSLDocument(). This function contains all the magic. In order to not repeat ourselves we keep the internals of making a document for the Lucene index in the User class itself. Let's look at it:

We're really just dumping the relevant search terms into this document. The beauty of keeping this code internalized in the User class is we can reuse it later if we need to index a single User at a time.

A couple things to note. Zend_Search_Lucene_Field::Keyword allows us to store data that we can lookup later. We store the User::id in a field called uid since id is a reserved word for the index and we can't access it from Zend Search Lucene.

In a batch script or a reindex action we can now just call UserPeer::reindex() and have a working search index for our users.

Storing things in app.yml is great for indexes that don't need to be searched in multiple applications. ↩
Since we're using a Lucene index, which has an open documented structure, we aren't limited to just using Zend Search Lucene or Apache Lucene (java). We can mix and match and read and write to the same index file. For very large indexes (65,000+ documents), I rewrote a Java application to index all the documents at once as PHP would time out during such a task. ↩

The Lucene Search Index and symfony

2007-04-23T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]Zend, Zend Search Lucene, Search, Lucene, php, symfony, zsl, index[/tags]

This article is meant to followup sfZendPlugin where we learn a newer way of obtaining the Zend Framework.

We'll want to store in our app.yml the precise location of this index file so we can refer to it in our app¹.

Here's an example:

all:
  search:
    user_index: /tmp/myapp.user.lucene.index

Now when we need to refer to the index we can do sfConfig::get('app_search_user_index').

Index Something

In a batch script or a reindex action we can now just call UserPeer::reindex() and have a working search index for our users.

Storing things in app.yml is great for indexes that don't need to be searched in multiple applications. ↩
Since we're using a Lucene index, which has an open documented structure, we aren't limited to just using Zend Search Lucene or Apache Lucene (java). We can mix and match and read and write to the same index file. For very large indexes (65,000+ documents), I rewrote a Java application to index all the documents at once as PHP would time out during such a task. ↩

MinneBar

2007-04-21T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]Minnebar, symfony, barcamp, frameworks, php, php5[/tags]

I gave a quick overview of the symfony framework for PHP5 at MinneBar. If you have questions or comments about symfony or my talk, feel free to leave them here.

MinneBar

2007-04-21T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]Minnebar, symfony, barcamp, frameworks, php, php5[/tags]

I gave a quick overview of the symfony framework for PHP5 at MinneBar. If you have questions or comments about symfony or my talk, feel free to leave them here.

Tips for symfony and Subversion

2007-04-17T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]symfony, subversion[/tags]

There's some tricks you can do to running a symfony project with subversion:

Ignoring files in `cache/` and `log/`

The first thing you can do (and this is well documented in the askeet tutorial) is ignore files in cache/ and log/. These files are specific to each instance of your app and don't contain anything that needs to be in version control.

Run the following:

cd $SF_ROOT
rm -rf log/* cache/*
svn propedit svn:ignore log
svn propedit svn:ignore cache

svn propedit will bring up a text editor, in both instances you want to save the following:

Ignore other auto-generated files

Eric Sink wrote an excellent tutorial on source control. In his chapter on repositories he recommends checking in only hand edited source code. If a property file generates another file, check in the property file, not the auto-generated result. This not only keeps your repository clean, it prevents a lot of unnecessary check-ins.

If you use propel for your ORM layer there are a few files you can ignore using svn propedit svn:ignore {dirname}.

In $SF_ROOT/config we can ignore:

*schema-transformed.xml

These are xml files that propel generates from schema.xml (or schema.yml).

In $SF_ROOT/data/sql we can ignore:

lib.model.schema.sql
plugins.*.sql
sqldb.map

These are created from schema.xml (or schema.yml) as well.

The real savings will come with your model. The propel model creates customizable php classes in lib/model which inherit from auto-generated files in lib/om there are also auto-generated map files in `lib/map'

We can run from $SF_ROOT:

svn propedit svn:ignore lib/model/om
svn propedit svn:ignore lib/model/map

and enter

for both properties.

If you've mistakenly checked in some of these files you will need to remove them from your repository via svn delete.

Linking the symfony Library

I prefer to embed the symfony library into each of my symfony apps rather than relying on a shared PEAR library. This lets me run multiple versions of symfony without much fuss. With subversion we can use the svn:externals property to directly link our app with the symfony subversion repository.

At first this sounds like danger, but externals can be linked to specific revisions. However, the symfony team tags their repository with version numbers. To get this to work we need to do 3 things. (UPDATE: See Fabien's comment about using the lib/vendor directory)

Modify config/config.php to look for symfony internally. Just open it up and change it so it says this:
<?php $sf_symfony_lib_dir = dirname(<strong>FILE</strong>).'/../lib/symfony'; $sf_symfony_data_dir = dirname(<strong>FILE</strong>).'/../data/symfony';
Run svn propedit svn:externals lib from $SF_ROOT and enter:
```
 symfony http://svn.symfony-project.com/tags/RELEASE_1_0_2/lib/
```
or whatever version of symfony you want to link to, at the time of this post, RELEASE_1_0_2 is fairly fresh.
Run svn propedit svn:externals data from $SF_ROOT and enter:
```
 symfony http://svn.symfony-project.com/tags/RELEASE_1_0_2/data/
```
or whatever version of symfony you want to link to, at the time of this post.

Now when you do svn update you'll have the symfony library all linked up. Furthermore this keeps all the developers on the same version of symfony.

Also you may want to start running symfony using ./symfony versus symfony. The former looks at your configuration settings to determine which symfony command to use, the latter is generally linked to your system wide command (which is generally the PEAR installed command).

Linking to symfony Plugins

I have my hands in a number of symfony plugins because I work on a lot of projects which tend to share a lot of similar functionality. Many of the plugins are in early stages of development, so I find it helpful to have them linked from svn as well. This way I can get the benefits of any new functionality and if the occasion should arise, I can contribute any useful changes I make.

To link to the plugins you run svn propedit svn:externals plugins and enter one plugin per line in the following format:

{plugin_name} -r{REVISION} {URL}

For one of my projects I use:

sfPrototypeTooltipPlugin http://svn.symfony-project.com/plugins/sfPrototypeTooltipPlugin
sfGuardPlugin http://svn.symfony-project.com/plugins/sfGuardPlugin
sfZendPlugin http://svn.symfony-project.com/plugins/sfZendPlugin

I've omitted the revision, because I live dangerously and want to use the latest $HEAD.

Tips for symfony and Subversion

2007-04-17T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]symfony, subversion[/tags]

There's some tricks you can do to running a symfony project with subversion:

Ignoring files in `cache/` and `log/`

Run the following:

cd $SF_ROOT
rm -rf log/* cache/*
svn propedit svn:ignore log
svn propedit svn:ignore cache

svn propedit will bring up a text editor, in both instances you want to save the following:

Ignore other auto-generated files

If you use propel for your ORM layer there are a few files you can ignore using svn propedit svn:ignore {dirname}.

In $SF_ROOT/config we can ignore:

*schema-transformed.xml

These are xml files that propel generates from schema.xml (or schema.yml).

In $SF_ROOT/data/sql we can ignore:

lib.model.schema.sql
plugins.*.sql
sqldb.map

These are created from schema.xml (or schema.yml) as well.

We can run from $SF_ROOT:

svn propedit svn:ignore lib/model/om
svn propedit svn:ignore lib/model/map

and enter

for both properties.

If you've mistakenly checked in some of these files you will need to remove them from your repository via svn delete.

Linking the symfony Library

Modify config/config.php to look for symfony internally. Just open it up and change it so it says this:
<?php $sf_symfony_lib_dir = dirname(<strong>FILE</strong>).'/../lib/symfony'; $sf_symfony_data_dir = dirname(<strong>FILE</strong>).'/../data/symfony';
Run svn propedit svn:externals lib from $SF_ROOT and enter:
```
 symfony http://svn.symfony-project.com/tags/RELEASE_1_0_2/lib/
```
or whatever version of symfony you want to link to, at the time of this post, RELEASE_1_0_2 is fairly fresh.
Run svn propedit svn:externals data from $SF_ROOT and enter:
```
 symfony http://svn.symfony-project.com/tags/RELEASE_1_0_2/data/
```
or whatever version of symfony you want to link to, at the time of this post.

Now when you do svn update you'll have the symfony library all linked up. Furthermore this keeps all the developers on the same version of symfony.

Linking to symfony Plugins

To link to the plugins you run svn propedit svn:externals plugins and enter one plugin per line in the following format:

{plugin_name} -r{REVISION} {URL}

For one of my projects I use:

sfPrototypeTooltipPlugin http://svn.symfony-project.com/plugins/sfPrototypeTooltipPlugin
sfGuardPlugin http://svn.symfony-project.com/plugins/sfGuardPlugin
sfZendPlugin http://svn.symfony-project.com/plugins/sfZendPlugin

I've omitted the revision, because I live dangerously and want to use the latest $HEAD.

sfZendPlugin

2007-04-10T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]Zend, Zend Search Lucene, Search, Lucene, php, symfony, zsl, plugins[/tags]

I originally intended to rewrite my Zend Search Lucene tutorial, but Peter Van Garderen covered the bulk of what's changed and I was too busy developing search functionality for lyro.com (not to mention finding inconsistencies with the Zend Search Lucene port and Lucene) to finish the tutorial. So I broke it up into smaller pieces.

I packaged Zend Framework into a symfony plugin. symfony is easily extended using plugins.

You can obtain this from subversion with the following command (from your /plugins directory):

svn export http://svn.symfony-project.com/plugins/sfZendPlugin

symfony has a Zend Framework Bridge which let's us autoload the framework by adding the following to settings.yml:

.settings:
  zend_lib_dir:   %SF_ROOT_DIR%/plugins/sfZendPlugin/lib
  autoloading_functions:
    - [sfZendFrameworkBridge, autoload]

First we define sf_zend_lib_dir to be in our plugin's lib directory. Then we autoload the bridge framework.

After setting this up, all the Zend classes will be available and auto-loaded from elsewhere in your code.

sfZendPlugin

2007-04-10T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]Zend, Zend Search Lucene, Search, Lucene, php, symfony, zsl, plugins[/tags]

I packaged Zend Framework into a symfony plugin. symfony is easily extended using plugins.

You can obtain this from subversion with the following command (from your /plugins directory):

svn export http://svn.symfony-project.com/plugins/sfZendPlugin

symfony has a Zend Framework Bridge which let's us autoload the framework by adding the following to settings.yml:

.settings:
  zend_lib_dir:   %SF_ROOT_DIR%/plugins/sfZendPlugin/lib
  autoloading_functions:
    - [sfZendFrameworkBridge, autoload]

First we define sf_zend_lib_dir to be in our plugin's lib directory. Then we autoload the bridge framework.

After setting this up, all the Zend classes will be available and auto-loaded from elsewhere in your code.

Caching REST with sfFunctionCache

2007-04-07T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]geocoding, caching, REST, symfony, Cache_Lite, php, cache, sfFunctionCache[/tags]

For reviewsby.us we do a lot of geocoding. To facilitate we use Yahoo! Geocoding API. This helps us normalize data, obtain latitude and longitude, interpret location specific searches.

These REST queries happen a lot and will continue to happen, but this data that Yahoo! provides is fairly static. We're basically querying a database of sorts. So it makes sense that we should cache this data.

We'll demonstrate how to cache these queries using symfony's sfFunctionCache class.

I wrote a wrapper (I'll release it as a plugin if requested) for the Geocoding API, the bulk of the work (the REST call) occurs in a function called doQueryGIS:

The call to this function is always wrapped with queryGIS:

This wrapper creates a sfFunctionCache objet and calls the function and caches it for subsequent queries.

What this means is once Yahoo! teaches reviewsby.us that India is located at (25.42°, 77.830002°) and that the precision is 'country' we remember it in the future.

These features will be incorporated into future versions of reviewsby.us.