sfPropelPager and GROUP BY criteria

So for one reason or another (actually a few bad ones) I ended up having to use a Criteria object looking like this:

<?php
$c = new Criteria ( );
$having = $c->getNewCriterion('the_count', count($tags), Criteria::GREATER_EQUAL);
$c->add(TaggingPeer::TAG_ID, $tags, Criteria::IN);
$c->addSelectColumn("COUNT(*) AS the_count");
$c->addSelectColumn(TaggingPeer::ID);
$c->addSelectColumn(TaggingPeer::TAGGABLE_ID);
$c->addSelectColumn(TaggingPeer::TAGGABLE_MODEL);
$c->addGroupByColumn(TaggingPeer::TAGGABLE_MODEL);
$c->addGroupByColumn(TaggingPeer::TAGGABLE_ID);
$c->addHaving($having);

It makes SQL that looks something like this:

SELECT tag_id, tag_model, id, COUNT(*) AS the_count FROM sf_tagging WHERE tag_id IN (1,2,3) GROUP BY taggable_model, taggable_id HAVING the_count > int

The query sucks but whatever it works.

My issue came when I tried to use it with a sfPropelPager. I set up the pager per usual but for some reason the results that were coming back weren’t correct. For some reason, the COUNT being returned by the sfPropelPager was completely wrong. It turns out the offending lines are here in sfPropelPager.class.php :

<?php
public function init()
{
  $hasMaxRecordLimit = ($this->getMaxRecordLimit() !== false);
  $maxRecordLimit = $this->getMaxRecordLimit();

  $cForCount = clone $this->getCriteria();
  $cForCount->setOffset(0);
  $cForCount->setLimit(0);
  $cForCount->clearGroupByColumns();

}

For whatever reason, sfPropelPager clears the GROUP BY clauses before it calculates the COUNT for a criteria object. I’m not sure why it does this – but it certainly is unexpected and breaks my query in particular.

There are a handful of posts about this on the Symfony forums and it looks like the Propel people know about the issue to.

The solution to this is to use the setPeerCountMethod() from sfPropelPager. The setPeerCountMethod() function allows you to specify a custom COUNT() method inside the peer for your Criteria. I went ahead and added a new function to put the GROUP BY columns back in:

<?php
public static function advancedSearchCount($c){
  $c->addGroupByColumn(TaggingPeer::TAGGABLE_MODEL);
  $c->addGroupByColumn(TaggingPeer::TAGGABLE_ID);
  return self::doCount($c);
}

This solution works but it is extremely rigid. Since the custom count function has to be static you’d really be out of luck if you had variable columns or other dynamic requirements.

I’d love to know if someone has a cleaner/better/more elegant solution for this.

Client-side validation for the new Symfony forms with jQuery

The new Symfony forms are great improvement over the old forms and once you get over the learning curve you can’t imagine life without them. The only problem with them is that they don’t really offer client-side validation (yes, being agnostic when it comes to Javascript libraries is maybe good but come on). There is fortunately a plugin that does client-side validation but it is Prototype-based, and looks a bit clunky.

For those of us using jQuery there was nothing, so we decided to write our own small helper that integrates this jQuery validator with the new forms. It’s nothing fancy, but it does the trick for now, and we may expand it into a full-fledged plugin that does all sorts of crazy things.

Using the helper:

  1. Download and install thejQuery validation plugin.
  2. Download the helper and put it in lib/helper/jQueryValHelper.php
  3. Include the jQueryVal helper.
  4. To enable the helper for a specific form: <?php echojquery_val_form_tag($form, array(‘action’=> url_for(“@register) ))?>

That’s it.

The validator currently supports email, min and max length validation. The only required option is action, the other options you can pass it are:

  1. error_placement: Change where the errors are rendered, for example: ‘error_placement’ <span>=> </span>‘error.prependTo(element.parent().next())’
  2. error_element: Change the element used to render the errors, default is label.

All other options you pass are added to the form as attributes.

Playing with appjet

The other day one of my friends jokingly mentioned that he thought stripperswere being “marginalized” as profession. I thought this was funny, so I leveraged the powers of the internet to prove to him that in fact strippers are less marginalized then say podiatrists.

Enter amimarginalized.com

Anyway, with all of the hub-dub about Javascript being the next “big thing” I decided to give appjet a whirl. Appjet allows developers to develop and deploy server side Javascript applications. Additionally, appjet recently released “appjet in a jar” which lets users deploy the appjet platform on a different server.

Getting the appjet platform up and running was really simple. I already had Java 6 installed on one of our servers so all I had to do was download the appjet jar and fire it up with “java -jar appjet.jar”

In general, getting things moving was pretty easy with appjet. It also just “feels” natural to write Javascript for the client and the server. Switching between client and server is done with a comment directive:

/* appjet:client */
/* appjet:server */

appjet also provides a special directive for CSS styles:

/* appjet:css */

The other feature I really liked about appjet is its support for printing HTML elements. Appjet comes with a tag library that makes creating HTML tags particularly simple. The syntax looks something like this:

print(

FORM({action:"/", method:"get", onsubmit: "javascript: return submitJob()"},
SPAN({id: "job-label"}, "Job Title: "),
INPUT({text:"text", name:"jobField", id: "jobField"}),
INPUT({type:"hidden", name:"isPost", id: "isPost", value: "1"}),
INPUT({type: "submit", value: "Submit"})
)
);

And boom you have a XHTML compliant form.

The other neat feature, (from the appjet docs) is that “You can also treat a tag like a JavaScript array (it has all the same methods) and add to it programmatically.” so something like this works:

var list = UL();

list.push(LI("One item"));
list.push(LI("Two item"));

["Red","Blue"].forEach(
function(color) {
list.push(LI(color+" item"));
}
);

printp("The following "+list.length+" items may be of interest.");
print(list);

I was also really impressed with the appjet persistent storage system. The platform lets you persist arbitrary Javascript objects in “collections” that can then be iterated, filtered, and sorted. On amimarginalized.com I have about 800 elements loaded up and it seems to perform reasonably well.

The one issue I have with the storage library is that there isn’t any way to just load a bunch of data into the system. You can only load data from inside an appjet script file. The problem I ran into is that I hit the Java 64kb file size limit pretty quickly. It would be really awesome if the JAR had some functionality to load up say a file full of JSON objects.

All and all, using appjet has been a positive experience. It was really easy and fun to build an “easy” app using it. I’d really like to know some more about how appjet is put together but the documentation is sparse. The only information I could find was the logos on the download page. They suggest that appjet is composed off AppJet, Rhino, Jetty and of course Java. I’d be interested to know if there are any plans to expose JVM libraries to appjet code. It seems like this would allow the platform to quickly gain extensive library support - including the JDBC.

Anyway, the amimarginalized.com site uses “advanced” algorithms to determine how marginalized your career is. It just counts the number of results on Yahoo BOSS for the job you enter and compares it to a set of about 800 saved jobs.

You can download the source code here.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays

Setfive would like to wish everyone a merry Christmas and happy holidays.  We hope everyone has a great holiday season.  We’ll be bringing in the new year with a bang, and look forward to working with you.

Happy Holidays All!

JSON explorer for Firebug!

As Firefox plugins go, Firebug is definitely one of my favorites. It has saved me and the rest of the Setfive team dozens of development hours. One of the nicest features of Firebug is the NET panel. The NET panel allows a developer to monitor HTTP requests that Firefox is making during the course of a page’s execution. This is particularly useful to AJAX heavy applications because it allows a developer to easily debug XHR requests and responses.

Although this is great, the NET panel is severely lacking when it comes to dealing with JSON responses. Since JSON must be a legal JavaScript string, it can’t contain any line breaks. As a consequence, debugging long JSON strings is extremely painful.

This issue has been on the Firebug TODO list for some time. I figured this would be a good place to jump into the Firebug codebase. I dropped an email to the Firebug working group and received some great feedback. Honza gave me a template extension to extend the NET panel and provided some great insight and advice on implementing a JSON viewer.

After a couple of weeks of intermittent work, the JSON-Viewer extension is ready to play with. Honza has committed the code into the Firebug 1.4+ branch so if you grab a new build you’ll be able to use the JSON viewer.

Screenie:

Read more at Honza’s blog post