{5} Setfive - Talking to the World - Page 41 of 66 - Ramblings on code, startups, and everything in between

Recently I was working on a project where I kept finding myself ordering a relation over and over by other than something than ID order (ie id= 1,2,3,4,5). For example, I always wanted my relation to be ordered by the ‘name’ field, rather than the ID or order it was inserted into the DB. Let’s take this schema as an example:

The issue is each time I attempted:

I wanted the output to be in alphabetical order for example. To make this the default for that relation you can add the following annotation to your ‘Post’ entity:

Now if you do “$post->getPostAttachments()” they’ll be automatically in order. The ‘@ORM\OrderBy’ column takes care of the ordering automatically. You can specify as many columns on the relation as you’d like there. In addition, this will make it so that all form collections on post with post_attachments are also ordered by name, rather than ID. This affects the relation call every time. If you are only looking into having it some of the time, look into using the repository to do the ordering for those calls.

Earlier this week, a buddy of mine reached out looking for interesting Symfony2 resources that went beyond the “basic” tutorial type content. He was looking to really get into the “nitty gritty” of the framework, how larger projects are using it, and hopefully understand some of the philosophy behind service oriented architectures, dependency injection, and behavior driven development.

Not wanting to leave him hanging, Daum and I took to Slideshare to compile a list of presentations that we thought demonstrated some of these concepts well. Anyway, here is the list we came up with.

	How Kris Writes Symfony Apps You’ve seen Kris’ open source libraries, but how does he tackle coding out an application? Walk through green fields with a Symfony expert as he takes his latest “next big thing” idea from the first line of code to a functional prototype. Learn design patterns and principles to guide your way in organizing your own code and take home some practical examples to kickstart your next project.
	Practical BDD with Behat and Mink An introduction into behavior-driven development with Behat and Mink. A Symfony2 application is used for examples. This was presented in the Top Shelf PHP tutorial at OSCON 2011: http://www.oscon.com/oscon2011/public/schedule/detail/18980 There were some issues converting from ODP, so a PDF version is here: http://jmikola.net/slides/20110725_bdd.pdf
	BDD in Symfony2 Quality assurance is one of the most difficult things to implement around software development. Most of time it is left for the final phase of development and very often overlooked entirely. As many experienced web development teams already know, QA needs to be part of the development process from the get-go. Behavior development/testing is just one aspect of quality assurance. And we’ll talk about that.
	Being Dangerous with Twig Twig – the PHP templating engine – is easy to use, friendly and extensible. This presentation will introduce you to Twig and show you how to extend it to your bidding.
	OpenSky Infrastructure
	Dependency Injection in PHP 5.3/5.4

If you have other presentations you think we should check out, leave them in the comments or shoot us a tweet @setfive.

The documentation for the SonataAdminBundle mentions how to expose services inside your Admin class using XML:

But unfortunately it doesn’t detail how to do it YAML. Turns out its pretty straightforward, the “gotcha” of course being you need to add the “@” to indicate a service:

Recently we were using Behat on a new project with the Symfony2 extension. It took a bit to get it up and running correctly as the docs (for the extension setup) seem to be incorrect. First place the behat.yml directly in the project root. Second, when using the “@” notation to reference your bundle you need to be sure to enclose it in quotes. For example, ‘bin/behat –init “@MyBundle”‘. Without the quotes it will not be parsed correctly and will not setup the structure as you want.

If you are running into the following error:

Most likely the initial setup didn’t go correctly. We kept having that issue whenever we added the behat.yml to our root directory, but then didn’t use the quotes to enclose the @MyBundle. Hopefully this saves you the headache!

I’ve shot over a pull request to the main behat repo for the extension so it hopefully will be fixed soon:

Happy testing!

A few days ago, a friend of mine reached out asking for a good solution for securely transferring a relatively large (~1GB) file to several of her prospective clients. Strangely, even in 2013 the options for transferring such a large file in a reliable manner is pretty limited. I looked into services like YouSendIt, WeTransfer, and SendThisFile but they all suffer from similar limitations. Most of them have a <1GB file size limit, their payment plans are monthly subscription based instead of pay as you go, and they don’t offer custom domains or access control. Apart from these services, there is also the trusty old school option of using an FTP server but that raises the issue of having to maintain your own FTP server, using a non-intuitive FTP client, and still being locked into paying a monthly fee instead of “pay as you go". Stepping back and looking at the issue from a different angle, it then became clear that the S3 component of Amazon’s Web Service offering is actually an ideal solution for this problem. The S3 piece of AWS is basically a flexible “cloud based” storage solution that lets you programmatically upload files, store them indefinitely, and then serve them as you please. Looking at the issues we’re trying to overcome, S3 satisfies all of them out of the box. S3 has a single file size limit of 5 Terabytes, files can be served off a custom domain like archives.setfive.com, billing is pay as you go depending on the resources you use, and S3 supports access control so you have fine grained access over who can download files and for how long. So how do you actually use S3?

Setting up and using S3

The first thing you’ll need is an Amazon account that has S3 enabled. If you already have an Amazon account, just head over to http://aws.amazon.com/s3/ to activate S3 for your account.
Next, there are several ways to actually use S3 but the easy way is probably using Amazon’s own Web Console. Just head over to https://console.aws.amazon.com/s3/home?region=us-east-1 to load the console.
In AWS parlance, you’ll need to create a “bucket” which is the root organizational structure on S3. You can map a “bucket” to a custom domain name so think of it like the “drive” that you’re upload files to. Go ahead and create a bucket!
Next, click the name of your bucket and you’ll get “into” the bucket where you should see a notice telling you the bucket is empty. This is where you can upload and delete files or create additional organizational folders. To upload a file, click the “Actions” menu in the header and select “Upload”. Click upload, and then in the popup select “Add Files” to add some files and “Stat Upload” to kick off the upload.
When the upload finishes, in the left panel you’ll see the file you just upload. Congratulations you’re using the cloud! If you want to make the file PUBLIC, just right click on it and click “Make Public”, this will let you access the file without any special URL arguments like https://s3.amazonaws.com/big-bertha/logo_horizontal.png
To get the link for your file, click it to see the properties and then on the right panel you’ll see the link.
To delete a file, just right click on it and select “Delete”

Anyway, thats a quick rundown of how to use Amazon’s S3 service for file transfers. The pricing is also *very* cheap compared to traditional “large file transfer” services.

Check out some other useful links about S3:

Symfony2 and Ordering of Relations and Collection Form Fields

Symfony2: A Few Slideshares Worth Checking Out

Symfony2: YAML to expose a service inside SonataAdminBundle

Behat and Symfony2 – A Simple Gotcha

S3: Using Amazon S3 for large file transfers

Setting up and using S3