Last week we launched RentPrefs a new take on renting an apartment. RentPrefs flips the process around by allowing renters to post their preferences and then allowing agents to match them with listings that fit their criteria.
Anyway, yesterday Xconomy did an awesome write up about them so definitely check it out. We also got a nice mention at the end there!
Happy Friday!
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.
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.
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.
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!