Recently I received an email from Davert. He noted that the sfSCMIgnoresTaksPlugin would not work on Windows as Windows has a different directory separator. He sent over a patch which uses PHP’s DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR instead of the coded “/”. This makes the plugin compatible on Windows. Thanks Davert. You can read more about the plugin and download the most recent release at http://www.symfony-project.org/plugins/sfSCMIgnoresTaskPlugin.
For a client we’ve been working with recently it came to our attention that they needed more frontend servers to keep up with the traffic for their surveys. They use LimeSurvey which is powerful open source survey platform. We set the client up in the cloud to scale as necessary with a load balancer in front. This is when we noticed the problem that LimeSurvey doesn’t work well when a user is bouncing between different frontend servers. LimeSurvey keeps all the user’s session attributes on the local server and not in the database. After googling around for a while, we found other people also had this problem before, and no one had really solved it. We figured we would.
We didn’t feel like doing a ton of extra work to reinvent the wheel in terms of storing the session in the database. We snagged most of the code straight from the Symfony “storage” module which handles it’s session management if you want to store the user sessions in a database. After a quick few modifications, we got it up:
This requires you create a table in your MySQL database called session. Here is a dump of the create statement for the table:
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `session` ( `id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment, `sess_id` varchar(255) NOT NULL, `sess_data` text NOT NULL, `sess_time` datetime NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`id`) ) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=1;
Basically this uses PHP’s session_set_handler function to manipulate how the PHP retrieves, updates, and stores the user’s session. The final touches were to include this class where the user sessions are started in LimeSurvey. We found them in the index.php and sessioncontrol.php files. Include our file from above just before the session_start(); in the code in those two files. In admin/scripts/fckeditor.265/editor/filemanager/connectors/php/upload.php include the file before the first include. Lastly we need to update a couple locations where it does session_regenerate_id and replace it with $sfSessionHandler->regenerate(). You can find these edits in the following three files: admin/usercontrol.php on line 128, admin/login_check.php line 65, and index.php at lines 207 and 215. You should be up and running now, let us know if you have any problems.
So earlier today I was working on a Facebook App and wanted to use “partials” in a similar fashion as Symfony’s partials. At this point, I realized I had no idea how Symfony placed variables into the current execution scope when you do things like
include_partial("somePartial", array("foo" => $foo, "bar" => $bar));
A bit of digging led me to the extract() function in PHP.
From the documentation, “extract — Import variables into the current symbol table from an array”.
Pretty neat.
Every now and then, I’ll end up having to scrape HTML pages for some content. I know, I know, there’s like a bazillion different ways to do this, but I *really* like doing it in PHP so I can jack right into Symfony. Usually, I just get down and dirty with the PHP DOM and use XPath to select nodes within the document. The problem with this is that the XPath sucks and the PHP implementation sucks…alot.
But hold on, we know a selector engine that doesn’t suck! The jQuery selector engine, called Sizzle is probably one of the best CSS/DOM selector engines to use. Turns out there is a PHP port! Enter phpQuery
At its root, phpQuery is a port of the jQuery selector syntax to PHP. Additionally, phpQuery includes dozens of the jQuery traversal methods like next(), prev(), find(), and so on. It also implements the CSS3 filters like :first, :last, :eq, ect.
Anyway, if you’re tired of suffering through the PHP XPath implementation and dig jQuery then you should definitely give phpQuery a whirl.
We were recently working on an application that required users to enter a significant amount of complex data that often meant that they had to look things up in between saves. Users kept running into the problem that their sfGuard sessions would timeout before they were able to click “Save” on the form which in turn caused them to loose all of their hard work. Obviously, this is lame so we decided to add a popup warning users that their session had expired and prompting them to login again before saving their data.
We decided to implement this by using setTimeout in Javascript to pop up a window once the user’s session had expired.
Setting the session length for a Symfony user is easy enough, open up app/config/factories.yml and add the following:
all:
user:
class: myUser
param:
timeout: 1800 # this is the default but you can change it at will (its in seconds)
As it turns out, the tricky part is how do you access this value inside the application? Un-characteristically, I couldn’t find anything in the Symfony documentation about how to access these variables. For whatever reason, sfConfig::get() doesn’t provide access to the variables in factories.yml.
In order to get that timeout value I used (inside a template):
$userOptions = $sf_user->getOptions(); $timeout = $userOptions["timeout"];
Anyway, once I figured that out the rest is pretty straightforward.
After $timeout a Javascript function opens a jQuery UI Dialog box informing the user that their session has expired and presents the standard sfGuard sign in form. I override the onSubmit of this form to perform the request via AJAX in the background (so the user doesn’t loose their data) and then if the credentials are valid the dialog closes and the user can go on their way. If the credentials are invalid, the form re-populates with any errors and the user can correct them to re-login to the app.
Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving!