Category: PHP

Celebrating Symfony2 With One Free Project

By Matt Daum | 1 Comment on Celebrating Symfony2 With One Free Project

Symfony2 was released this past Thursday.  This marks a huge advancement in the framework with tons of new features, better programming patterns, and much better performance.  Symfony2 is now the most popular PHP project on GitHub and contributors are helping better it each day.

Since we are so excited for this release, we are going to take on one small free project for the person or company who submits the best idea and reason for their project.  We’ll be picking the free project within one week of today. Shoot us an email with your project and reason you’d like it done for free.

Congrats to the entire Symfony2 team and we look forward to helping out with it!

Drupal 7: Batch insert nodes with Drush

By Ashish Datta | 3 Comments on Drupal 7: Batch insert nodes with Drush

Well D7 has been out for a little while now and we finally got a chance to use it on a site this week.

Anyway, this site is one of the heavier Drupal sites we’ve done and it involved loading ~200+ nodes of data just to set things up. This presented two problems, how to batch load data and then how to load custom content types with several custom fields.

The Drupal module documentation has example code for adding a node with drupal_exeucte here but it doesn’t deal with how to set custom fields on your content type. On top of this, drupal_execute has been renamed to drupal_form_submit in Drupal 7 and the function signature has changed a bit.

Anyway, I dug around a bit and finally managed to get this working. You’ll obviously need Drush installed for the following code to work but you could rip it out and use it outside a Drush command. I was looking to basically replicate the “load-data” task from Symfony so that I could seed my Drupal database with Nodes at any point so I chose to make this a Drush command.

Here’s what you need:

– You’ll need a module to hold the Drush task. I used Module Builder to generate my scaffolding.
– Create a file named [modulename].drush.inc in your module directory
– Here is the code I’m using for [modulename].drush.inc Replace “cm” with the name of your module:

Thats about it.

With Firebug, it’s really easy to see the field names and the values that you can set by just looking at a form to create whatever type of node you want.

drupal_form_submit can also be used to “submit” any other type of form in Drupal.

An open question is how to “fill out” an ImageField field via the command line since nothing is actually going to be uploaded.

Getting an extra ‘Invalid’ or other error on your symfony form?

By Matt Daum | Leave a Comment on Getting an extra ‘Invalid’ or other error on your symfony form?

On a project I’m working on I came across the following problem: we had a email field that we needed to be unique in our system, but we also made sure that it matched a confirm email field. A snippet of our form looks like this:

When we submitted an email that was already in the system we got back two errors:

  • Sorry! A user with that email address already exists.
  • Invalid.

For a while I thought is there some extra validator somewhere that I left on? Where is this invalid coming from? It ended up being due to the way the validators work. If a validator throws an error it doesn’t return that validator’s value. So by the time it gets to the sfValidatorSchemaCompare post validator the value of `email` is null and `confirm_email` has the value you input, thus the seemingly extra ‘Invalid’ message.

This can be fixed easily with a sfValidatorCallback instead of the sfValidatorSchemaCompare. Here is the fix:

This way if the email is blank it doesn’t both making sure that the `email` matches the `confirm_email`. You don’t need to worry about a person just passing two blank emails as the earlier validator(the sfValidatorEmail requires it to be there and valid).

If you are getting an extra validation error, check your postValidators and how the values get to them.

Changing a Doctrine connection with the same name in single instance

By Matt Daum | Leave a Comment on Changing a Doctrine connection with the same name in single instance

On one of our projects that we use multiple connections that are defined at run time we recently were generating reports that required us to change a specific connection multiple times in a single run.    We noticed that even though we would define a new connection, it would not throw any errors but just continue to use the originally defined connection.  Here is how we were doing the connections:

If you called the code above once, it would connect properly to the given DSN. However if you then called it a second time with a new DSN, it would not error and would simply just remain connected to the first DSN. After hunting around a bit it was the problem that Doctrine wasn’t assigning the new connection as the old connection was still open. To get around this we updated the code to the following:

You need to first check to see if the Doctrine Manager has the connection, as if you try to get a connection that doesn’t exist, it will throw an exception.

Hope this saves you some time!