{5} Setfive - Talking to the World - Page 44 of 66 - Ramblings on code, startups, and everything in between

A couple of days ago, we were looking to theme a set of Drupal 7 View filters that were also using AJAX to load the new View content. By default, the filters were rendering as a set of radio buttons so by default we were getting HTML that looked like this:

The problem was that given the design mockups we had, styling the filters to match with only CSS was going to be impossible. Writing a jQuery plugin to dynamically replace the filters with custom HTML was pretty straightforward but the tricky part was getting a notification that an AJAX request had completed so that we could reload the filters.

We managed to do this using the Drupal.behaviors Javascript object using code that looks similar to what is below:

Anyway, nothing to crazy but there doesn’t seem to be a ton of documentation about the Drupal.behaviors object.

A couple of months ago we started building out a Symfony 1.4 project for a client that involved allowing a “super admin” to add Doctrine models and columns at runtime. I know, I know, crazy/terrible/stupid idea but it mapped so well in to the problem space that we decided that a little “grossness” to benefit the readability of the rest of the project was worth it. Since users were adding models and columns at runtime we had to subsequently perform model rebuilds as things were added. Things worked fine for awhile, but eventually there were so many tables and columns that a single model rebuild was taking ~1.5 minutes on an EC2 large.

Initially, we decided to move the rebuild to a background cron process but even that began to take a prohibitively long time and made load balancing the app impossible. Then I started wondering is it possible to partially rebuild a Doctrine model for only the pieces that have changed?

Turns out it is possible. Looking at sfDoctrineBuildModelTask it looked like you could reasonably just copy the execute() method out and update a few lines.

Then, the next piece was just building the forms for the corresponding models. Again, looking at sfDoctrineBuildFormsTask it looked like it would be possible to extract and update the execute() method.

Anyway, without further ado here is the class I whipped up:

Using it is pretty straightforward, just call FastModelRebuild::doRebuild( array(“sfGuardUser”, “sfGuardUserProfile”) ); and thats it!

Anyway, fair warning I’d only do something like this if you “Know what you are doing” ™

As always, questions and comments are welcome.

Per Roger’s comment as of 11/14/2013 this no longer works :(

Over the weekend, I was looking for a good way to randomly browse GitHub. I hopped over to the GitHub search page but unfortunately there isn’t anyway to randomly search the repositories.

Just for fun, I decided to throw together a random repository browser. Check it out over at http://v3.setfive.com/adatta02_gitstumble/

Recently I was working on a project which was using the jQuery File Upload Plugin to do multiple file uploads. I needed to show the progress of each upload (in this case just images). Looking through their documentation it shows how to a few ways to do custom templates. By default it uses the Javascript Templates Engine for all of its templating. I wanted to use just a div on the page for my template. Here’s how I ended up doing it.

First My basic markup for the html:

Basically my “#template” div was a hidden div on the page which I used as the photo being uploaded. Now for the javascript:

It ended up being pretty simple and self explanatory. The ‘progress’ function is called each time there is a progress update. You can do more advanced templates using their templating engine, however as I was adapting the code to an existing layout and was on a time constraint this was the route I took.

Hope this saves you sometime if you are looking to just quickly add a progress template for the uploaded images.

I was working on a BackboneJS project recently that was using UnderscoreJS for templating and started wondering if its possible to invoke UnderscoreJS recursively.

At face value, the _.template function simply takes a template string and converts it to a first class Javascript function so I figured it would be possible. Out of curiosity, I decided to take a look at how the _. function is actually implemented:

Not any real surprises there – it basically does a series of string replaces on the template you pass in to interpolate any variables you want outputted, converts blocks you want evaluated to regular Javascript, and then injects the object you passed in into the local scope.

Then, the “magic” happens at “var render = new Function(settings.variable || ‘obj’, ‘_’, source);” where a new function is created with a “print” function locally defined and your template converted to a Javascript function.

Here is the “source” string that is passed into “new Function”:

That is the dynamic function generated for the following template:

Since its looking for the “template” function in the global scope it looks like everything should work fine. To test it, I decide to take the Fibonacci sequence and generate boxes for each of the numbers in the sequence up to some N.

Theres a live demo running at http://twitlabs.net/us/ and a Gist of the code is replicated below:

Just for fun, you can also change how the boxes are arranged by toggling between “Stacked” and “Cascaded”.

Anyway, fair warning – I imagine there are some performance implications regarding doing this as well as computational limits. You could potentially cause a stack overflow by consuming your entire stack via the recursion.

As always, questions, comments, concerns welcome!

Drupal 7: Fancy exposed view filters

Symfony 1.4 partial model rebuilds

Fun stuff: GitHub random repository browser

Per Roger’s comment as of 11/14/2013 this no longer works :(

Custom Templates with jQuery File Upload

Recursive templates with UnderscoreJS