Tag: symfony

Symfony2 and Impersonating Users, a Heads Up

By Matt Daum | 2 Comments on Symfony2 and Impersonating Users, a Heads Up

Recently I was working on a project in which it admins were able to impersonate other users.  It’s a fairly easy task to add to Symfony2, merely adding a switch_user reference to your firewall can make it possible, consult the Symfony docs for more on that.  One thing I noticed was that every now and then when testing I would get weird errors after switching between multiple users, however it didn’t always happen.  After some digging around, it turns out when you switch user it does not clear that sessions attributes, ie if you set attribute ‘hello’ to value ‘world’ it would persist after you’ve impersonated another user.  This caused a few issues as on this application we used the session to store a few things like which set of database connections you currently use.

After looking at the SecurityBundle configuration setup it was clear that there wasn’t any options to have it clear all session attributes on switch user.  At this point it was clear I needed to use an event listener as the firewall dispatched the SwitchUserEvent when a user successfully switched user.  Below is an excerpt from my services.yml
This makes it so that it will call the following code on a successful impersonation of a user:

It’s as simple as that, you can get the actual user by calling $event->getTargetUser(). Long story short, the session can have some tainted values when using switch user as all attributes are not cleared.

Symfony 1.4 partial model rebuilds

By Ashish Datta | Leave a Comment on Symfony 1.4 partial model rebuilds

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.

AJAX Request Slow With PHP? Here’s Why

By Matt Daum | 3 Comments on AJAX Request Slow With PHP? Here’s Why

Recently I was working on a project where we had a page which loads tons of data from numerous sources. I decided after a while that we wanted to AJAX each section of data so that the page would load a bit quicker. After splitting up the requests and sending them asyncronously, there was little improvement. I thought at first it may be due to the fact we were pinging a single API for most of the data multiple times, that wasn’t it. Maybe it was a browser limit? Nope was still far below the 6 requests most allow. I setup xdebug and kcachegrind and to my surprise it was the session_start() that was taking the most time on the requests.

I looked around the web for a while trying to figure out what in the world was going on. It turns out that PHP’s default session_start will block future session_starts for the same session until the session is closed. This is because the default method uses a file on the filesystem which it locks until you close it. If you want more information on this and how to close it you can read a bit more here.

We switched over to database based sessions and it fixed it. In symfony 1.4 the default session storage uses the file system, however switching over to sfPDOSessionStorage is very easy and quick.

Adding a task/command in Symfony2

By Ashish Datta | 7 Comments on Adding a task/command in Symfony2

I recently took the Symfony2 plunge and started working on a little fun side project (more on that later).

Anyway, this particular project involves sending out daily text messages using the rather awesome Twilio API so I decided to use a Symfony2 task for this. The documentation on how to actually add your own task is a bit sparse so I figured I’d share.

The process is actually pretty straight forward:

  1. In your bundle create a directory named “Command” (without the quotes).
  2. Create a file that extends ContainerAwareCommand
  3. Create a protected function configure – “protected function configure()” to allow you to configure the name of your task and add any options or arguments you might need.
  4. Create a protected function execute – “protected function execute(InputInterface $input, OutputInterface $output)” to actually do whatever needs to be done.
  5. Thats it! Now you can run app/console and you’ll see your task.

Here is the code for mine:

Celebrating Symfony2 With One Free Project

By Matt Daum | 1 Comment on Celebrating Symfony2 With One Free Project

Symfony2 was released this past Thursday.  This marks a huge advancement in the framework with tons of new features, better programming patterns, and much better performance.  Symfony2 is now the most popular PHP project on GitHub and contributors are helping better it each day.

Since we are so excited for this release, we are going to take on one small free project for the person or company who submits the best idea and reason for their project.  We’ll be picking the free project within one week of today. Shoot us an email with your project and reason you’d like it done for free.

Congrats to the entire Symfony2 team and we look forward to helping out with it!