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.
For a client we’ve been working with recently it came to our attention that they needed more frontend servers to keep up with the traffic for their surveys. They use LimeSurvey which is powerful open source survey platform. We set the client up in the cloud to scale as necessary with a load balancer in front. This is when we noticed the problem that LimeSurvey doesn’t work well when a user is bouncing between different frontend servers. LimeSurvey keeps all the user’s session attributes on the local server and not in the database. After googling around for a while, we found other people also had this problem before, and no one had really solved it. We figured we would.
We didn’t feel like doing a ton of extra work to reinvent the wheel in terms of storing the session in the database. We snagged most of the code straight from the Symfony “storage” module which handles it’s session management if you want to store the user sessions in a database. After a quick few modifications, we got it up:
This requires you create a table in your MySQL database called session. Here is a dump of the create statement for the table:
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `session` ( `id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment, `sess_id` varchar(255) NOT NULL, `sess_data` text NOT NULL, `sess_time` datetime NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`id`) ) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=1;
Basically this uses PHP’s session_set_handler function to manipulate how the PHP retrieves, updates, and stores the user’s session. The final touches were to include this class where the user sessions are started in LimeSurvey. We found them in the index.php and sessioncontrol.php files. Include our file from above just before the session_start(); in the code in those two files. In admin/scripts/fckeditor.265/editor/filemanager/connectors/php/upload.php include the file before the first include. Lastly we need to update a couple locations where it does session_regenerate_id and replace it with $sfSessionHandler->regenerate(). You can find these edits in the following three files: admin/usercontrol.php on line 128, admin/login_check.php line 65, and index.php at lines 207 and 215. You should be up and running now, let us know if you have any problems.
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!
Every now and then, we use Sphinx to provide full text searching in MySQL InnoDB tables. Sphinx is pretty solid. It’s easy to set up, pretty fast, and easy to deploy.
My one big issue with Sphinx has always been making it play nice with Symfony, specifically Propel. The way Sphinx returns a result set is as an ordered list of [id, weight] for each document it matched. As outlined here the idea is to then hit your MySQL server to return the actual documents and use “ORDER BY FIELD(id, [id list])” to keep them in the right order that you received the list.
The problem is, Propel Criteria objects provide no mechanism to set an ORDER BY FIELD. This is an issue because if you drop Criterias you loose Propel Pagers which generally adds to a lot of duplicated code and is honestly just not very elegant.
Anyway, after some thought I came up with this solution.
If you read through the definition of “Criteria::addDescendingOrderByColumn()”:
All it really does is add the second part of the ORDER BY clause to an array which then gets joined up to build the final SQL. Because of this, you can actually just add an element onto the orderByColumns array which will cause Propel to execute an ORDER BY FIELD SQL statement.
To make the magic happen, I sub-classed Criteria and then added a addOrderByField() function to let me add a field to order by as well as a list to order by.
Also add this function to make sure your ORDER BY FIELD columns get cleared:
To use it, do something like this:
And thats about it. Since sfCriteria is a sub-class of Criteria the code works seamlessly with existing PropelPagers and anything else that expects a Propel Criteria.
Today we are proud to unveil internOwl. internOwl is a site for students to research internships and find them. As the site grows students will be able to gain invaluable insight into the quality of different internships around the country. Currently the site is being launched with a focus on targeting Massachusetts’ students. We are excited to see how it performs.
If you are a student in the Amherst or Northampton area you can get a FREE burrito via the following url: http://www.internowl.com/bueno
We hope you all enjoy and there will be more updates about the site to follow as well as the technology used behind the site!