Installing Symfony 1.1 svn beside 1.0 stable

Announcements about Symfony 1.1 are becoming more frequent and with the creation of the 1.1 branch many users want to try it out and simply play around with 1.1 during the holiday season.

This guide is derived from InstallingMultipleVersionsOfSymfony and assumes you already have Symfony 1.0 installed (via PEAR) and running. Also note that i will use the PEAR directory to store Symfony 1.1 alongside my 1.0 installation, you can however put it wherever you like.

First off, check where your current Symfony installation is located. You could for example look at one of your projects “config/config.php” file – in my case it’s “/usr/lib/php/pear/symfony“, therefore i will be installing Symfony 1.1 one level above into “/usr/lib/php/pear“.

Create a directory for your installation and check out the current 1.1 branch:

sudo mkdir /usr/lib/php/pear/symfony_11
cd /usr/lib/php/pear/symfony_11
sudo svn co http://svn.symfony-project.com/branches/1.1 .

After the checkout is done, the next step is to create a symlink to the “symfony” php executable of the 1.1 checkout. You can find out where your current symfony command is stored with:

whereis symfony

In my case it’s located in “/usr/bin/“, that’s also where i will create the new symlink:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/php/pear/symfony_11/data/bin/symfony 
/usr/bin/symfony1.1

(Note: It’s important to use absolute paths here)

With this done, you will still have your usual “symfony” command which is linked against your stable PEAR version but also a new “symfony1.1” command which is linked against your subversion checkout.
You can verify it easily by executing each command with the -V parameter.

If everything is working, create a new symfony 1.1 project (as you might already know, Symfony 1.1 features new CLI commands, you can see them by executing the “symfony1.1” command):

mkdir sf11test && cd !$
symfony1.1 generate:project foobar
symfony1.1 generate:app frontend
symfony1.1 generate:module frontend helloworld

Finally, the only thing left to do is to create a Virtual Host, it’s identical to the ones you created for your Symfony 1.0 project except for the path, don’t forget to change it to the location of your symfony 1.1 branch!

<Directory "/usr/lib/php/pear/symfony_11/data/web/sf/">
  AllowOverride All
  Allow from All
</Directory>

<VirtualHost *:80>  
  ServerName sf11test  
  DocumentRoot "/Users/arthur/Webdev/sf11test/web"  
  DirectoryIndex index.php  

  Alias /sf /usr/lib/php/pear/symfony_11/data/web/sf/

  <Directory "/Users/arthur/Webdev/sf11test/web">
    AllowOverride All
    Allow from All
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Have fun!

sfReCaptchaPlugin update to 1.0.2

I just released a new version of the sfReCaptchaPlugin.
It updates the recaptcha-php library to version 1.9 (unfortunately there is no changelog available), fixes a problem in the example module where in some cases an error would’ve been thrown if no text was submitted and updates the documentation.

The most notably change to the recaptcha-php library is that constants are now used instead of globaly declared variables, so that the version included in the plugin doesn’t need to be modified anymore – which is great in terms of maintenance.

To upgrade your existing installation, just execute the following command:

symfony plugin-upgrade http://plugins.symfony-project.com/sfReCaptchaPlugin

Please go to the symfony-wiki page for more information.

Warning about PHP 5.2.4 and Creole

It’s almost half a month ago since PHP 5.2.4 was released and since I really like to update software ;-) I immediately upgraded from 5.2.3 – but the result was rather shocking – all my Symfony projects stopped working because of a Exception thrown by Propel: “Error populating Pages object [wrapped: Unable to convert value at column 13 to timestamp: 0000-00-00 00:00:00]“.

I watched the Symfony forums/mailing lists and the Propel mailing lists, but nothing similar was posted so that i tracked it down on my own and found the issue in Creole (DBAL used by Propel, which is used by Symfony).

The issue lies in the getTimestamp() function (Line 126 in creole/drivers/mysql/MySQLResultSet.php), which basically just converts a date from your database to a unix timestamp.Let’s say that your database field has the default value “0000-00-00 00:00:00″ set on a datetime field and the getTimestamp() function tries to parse this default value with strtotime, which worked fine in PHP 5.2.3 and below since this function would return “943905600″ (which equals to 1999-11-30, but don’t ask me why…) but was fixed in PHP 5.2.4. The function now returns boolean FALSE which is causing the function to fail and throw an Exception.

It’s okay that strtotime doesn’t accept “0000-00-00 00:00:00″ as a date and returns false instead, but since this value is often used as a default for a datetime field in Propel and will break your application(s).Unfortunately Creole is not actively maintained anymore, so don’t expect a fix for this issue, but you can of course fix it yourself like this:

if ($this->fields[$column] == '0000-00-00 00:00:00') {    // If the value is  '0000-00-00 00:00:00', set it back to the value strtotime() returned before PHP 5.2.4    $ts = '943916400';}else {    $ts = strtotime($this->fields[$column]);}

You can try the fix and work with Symfony and PHP 5.2.4, but I will go back to PHP 5.2.3 since i can’t be 100% sure that there is another error somewhere.Please state your opinion in the comments, thanks!

Update: Seth Wilson found another instance of this bug in \pear\symfony\vendor\creole\common\ResultSetCommon.php at line 356:

if ($ts === -1 || $ts === false) { // in PHP 5.1 return value changes to FALSE throw new SQLException("Unable to convert value at column " . $column . " to timestamp: " . $this->fields[$idx]);}

To fix it, just change it to :

if ($ts === -1 || $ts === false) { // in PHP 5.1 return value changes to FALSE  return '943916400';  #throw new SQLException("Unable to convert value at column " . $column . " to timestamp: " . $this->fields[$idx]);}

Thanks Seth!

Update 2: Symfony 1.0.9 fixes this problem, be sure to upgrade!

Tschitschereengreen.com re-launched

Today we re-launched Tschitschereengreen.com (where i’m currently working) with a new web2.0-like design. I did most of the XHTML/CSS stuff and some code fixes.
There’re still some small bugs, but i hope i can fix them next weekend.

 

Why i’m writing this here? Because the site runs on symfony ;-)

Doktus launched

I’m currently working in Dresden doing some pretty cool stuff for Tschitschereengreen.
Last Week we launched Doktus – a document sharing plattform developed with Symfony.

We replaced Zend_Search_Lucene with Sphinx, so that search performance got a huge speedup.
Generally speaking Zend_Search_Lucene isn’t bad, i had some nice conversations with Alexander Veremyev (Main Developer of ZSL), but the search still has some serious performance issues with indexing and searching large document sets.
Sphinx on the other hand is simply awesome, you might want to take a look at their website to see all the features. Development is also very active and the upcoming 0.9.8 release looks very promising.

The Flash uploader (which uses SWFUpload Revision 5) was also quite a bit of work, especially with Flash Player behaving different on Windows/Linux/Mac OS X.
For those people that doesn’t like Flash (like myself :-P), there’s a build-in fallback form which still let’s you upload a document.

What’s also pretty cool is all the small AJAX stuff we implemented. We’re using Prototype and script.aculo.us since Symfony already provides very useful helpers for this libraries.
Take for example the categories, the pagination or the sorting of documents, everything is AJAXified ;-)

Development is still ongoing so expect some more cool stuff to come.

Getting sfFillInFormFilter to output valid xhtml

The sfFillInFilter is really useful for form repopulation and often saves a great deal of time, but if you’ve worked with it you may also have noticed that, after a form repopulation, all of your xhtml-compliant code is transformed to regular html and thus breaks validation.
I noticed this on a project of mine where some parts of the site would render slightly different after a form repopulation, which caused me to investigate this topic a little bit.

Initially reported for symfony 0.6, it resulted in the addition of the „content_type“ parameter for the 1.0 release. If the parameter passes „xml“, DomDocument in sfFillInFormFilter will load and save XML rather than regular HTML. This seemed to work at first but with some time passed, another serious issue showed up with „xml“ as „content_type“ set. The form repopulation won’t work because the specified form cannot be found by the sfFillInFormFilter. This issue existed for quite some time.

In April 2007, ReeD started a forum thread about this issue and quickly found out that the DOMXPath cannot select elements of an XML document with default namespace defined.
With some help from vanchuck a patch was created and attached to trac, but as of today wasn’t included in trunk.

Testing

To show you how symfony behaves with and without the patch applied, i performed a small test with a fresh symfony 1.0.6 installation, a simple form with a few input fields and a small YAML validation file which just enables the sfFillInFormFilter and passes the form name to it:

fillin:
  enabled: true
  param:
    name: register

With the form put on a valid xhtml page, repopulated and redisplayed again, all of the self-closing tags like <input … /> are now converted to it’s non-selfclosing counterpart.
By adding the „content_type“ parameter and setting it to „xml“:

fillin:
  enabled: true
  param:
    name: register
    content_type: xml

the output is valid xhtml, but symfony now throws an „No form found in this page“ error and the form fields are not repopulated.

With the patch (which is mentioned above) applied to sfFillInForm.class.php and the same validation files as before, it will still needs the „content_type“ parameter set to „xml“. Without the paramter it still won’t find the form and repopulate it. But if the parameter is passed, sfFillInFormFilter will find your form and finally output valid xhtml!

Summary

To summarize it a little bit, here are three possible solutions that i came up with to get valid xhtml in symfony 1.0:

1. Not using xhtml for your page.
2. Not using sfFillInFormFilter.
3. Applying the patch and always setting the „content_type“ parameter to „xml“ in your validation files.

Since most of the build-in symfony helpers are using xhtml, it can be quite hard to migrate your code to regular html. You’ll either have not to use or rewrite them, which can take quite a time.
Not using the sfFillInFormFilter seems nice at first, but can be very time-consuming if you have forms with many fields to repopulate.
By using the patch you’ll always have to remember to set the „content_type“ parameter to „xml“ in your validation files.

Or maybe just wait for symfony 1.1 with its new and shiny form layer? You decide it! but for now i just hope that i could clear up this topic a little bit.
Please take some time and state your opinion in the comments, thanks!

CLI Cheat Sheet in German

I recently translated Andréia Bohner’s CLI cheat sheet in german. You can find the JPG and PDF version of the german translation in this post.

Thanks Andréia for creating the cheat sheet in the first place and the kind emails.

Howto create a counter cache in symfony

What’s a counter cache? I think that the Ruby on Rails wiki explains this best: “It caches the number of belonging objects on the associated class.“
Think about something like a weblog with posts and comments. You may want to display the number of comments each post has. Normally you would execute a query to count them, but with a counter cache the post table would have an extra field which updates every time a new comment is created or deleted. This way you save quite a few SQL queries.

While in symfony it isn’t that simple as in RoR, but it is relatively easy to do. Let’s take a look at the schama.yml first:

 

propel:
  post:
    id:
    title: varchar(255)
    body: longvarchar
    comment_count: integer
    created_at:

  comment:
    id:
    post_id:
    body: longvarchar
    author: varchar(50)
    created_at:

Notice the comment_count field in the post table, which will cache the number of associated comments to each post.
Build the model and open up the lib/model/Comment.php file in your editor. We need to override the save method and make sure that every time a comment is saved, the comment_count field of the associated post is updated:

public function save($con = null) 
{
  if ($this->isNew())
  {
    $this->getPost()->updateCommentCount();
  }
 
  return parent::save();
}

First we check with the isNew method if a comment really is a new comment because the save method is also used to save an modified object, and then we call the updateCommentCount method of the associated post to update the comment count.

Open the lib/model/Post.php file and create the updateCommentCount method:

public function updateCommentCount()
{
  $this->setCommentCount($this->getCommentCount() + 1);
}

And that’s it, now everytime a new comment is created, the comment_count field of the associated post is increased by one. You don’t have to worry about it anymore.

But there is still one thing missing: to decrease the comment_count field of an associated post each time a comment is deleted.

This isn’t a problem because the basics are the same: override the delete method of the Comment model and modify the updateCommentCount method of the Post model (or create increaseCommentCount / decreaseCommentCount methods if you like that more):

Here’s a example:

public function delete($con = null)
{
  $this->getPost()->updateCommentCount(false);
  
  return parent::delete();
}

As you can see i also modified the updateCommentCount method to handle both (in- and decreasing) cases:

public function updateCommentCount($increase = true)
{
  $count = $this->getCommentCount();
  $count = ($increase) ? $count + 1 : $count - 1;
  $this->setCommentCount($count);
  $this->save();
}

If i pass true as a parameter the comment_count field is increased by one and if a pass false it decreases the field by one. (Notice that you have to call the save method when you override the delete method because otherwise it wouldn’t save the updated count. It wasn’t necessary in the save method because the it already returned parent::save)

I also recommend watching this Railscast episode about counter cache, its not PHP but you get the clue.

All comments are appreciated.

sfReCaptchaPlugin update to 1.0.1

The first update for the sfReCaptchaPlugin is available, which updates the ReCaptcha php-library from version 1.6 to 1.8.

While there doesn’t seem to be a changelog around, i found the bugs at the mailinglist (here and here):

There was a problem with a variable which holds the url for the SSL authentication server, it was named $recaptcha_api_ssl_server instead of $recaptcha_api_secure_server.
Both, version 1.7 and 1.8 were adressed to fix this problem.

If you have version 1.0.0 of the plugin installed, you can update it by executing this command in your projects root directory:

symfony plugin-upgrade http://plugins.symfony-project.com/sfReCaptchaPlugin

 

Do we need to validate checkboxes?

It’s common knowledge to never trust any user input and to validate everything. But is this also true for checkboxes? Shouldn’t Propel handle this properly?

Well, it depends on whether you want to have just zeros and ones in your database field or don’t care – because Propel will write every numeric value in the database and not just zeros and ones.

Test

To check this, i used a small example to test if Propel really does save every value of the checkbox in the database:
I created a test module which had a template with a really simple form and just a checkbox:

 

<?php echo form_tag('boolean/index') ?>
  <?php echo checkbox_tag('value'); ?>
  <?php echo submit_tag('submit'); ?>
</form>

To save the value in the database (Note: The field was specified as a “boolean” in the schema.yml) , a simple action was required:

$checkbox = new Valuetest();
$checkbox->setValue($this->getRequestParameter('value'));
$checkbox->save();

With this, the application saved the value of the checkbox (ideally zero or one) in the “boolean” database field (which Propel translates to unsigned integer(11)).

This is where the real test began. What would’ve happend if the user transformed the checkbox field into a input field? (check out the Webdeveloper firefox extension, it’s really useful for this kind of tests)

Since the database field was of the integer type it wouldn’t save values like “abc” and instead just saved a zero.
But it turned out that Propel would’ve saved every other numeric value that will fit in the unsigned integer(11) field (This is a range from -2147483648 to 2147483647).

Here are a few examples which i entered in the datasbase and what Propel returned on a $foobar->getValue():

The value 0 returned false
The value -9123 returned true
The value 1 returned true
The value 9123 returned true

Conclusion

Your application will not be in danger if you don’t validate a checkbox field, since Propel will only return true or false for a field that is specified as boolean in the schema.yml.
But your database can be messy and have all kind of numeric values saved in it.

If you’re like me and just want to have zeroes or ones in your boolean database field, the best thing is to validate the checkbox field using a simple custom validator like this simple sfCheckboxValidator i wrote.

Please state your opinion on this topic in the comments, thanks!