Tag: symfony

FOSS Saturday: sfFbConnectGuardPlugin – sfGuard meets FB Connect

By Ashish Datta | Leave a Comment on FOSS Saturday: sfFbConnectGuardPlugin – sfGuard meets FB Connect

I was slaving over a hot keyboard all Friday!

But at last it is done – FBConnect for sfGuard.

Get it here http://www.symfony-project.org/plugins/sfFbConnectGuardPlugin

A detailed explanation of how to install it and use it is on the Symfony site.

Anyway, the plugin basically just introduces a new table to keep track of Facebook IDs <---> sfGuardUserIds

Here’s a fun nugget. One of the problems with using FB Connect is that you can’t mug a user’s email address from Facebook. Obviously this is a smart move on Facebook’s part but it makes life hard for my Nigerian spammer friends. If you want to snag a user’s email address (or anything else for that matter) while still using Facebook Connect here’s a sketch of how to do it.

Everything is the same except you can’t use Facebook’s FBML to render the FB Connect button. What you want to do instead is trigger the “connect” event by hand. Here is basically how we do it:

  1. The user requests to sign up.
  2. We pop up a Lightbox using Thickbox
  3. We ask the user for their email address and verify that is valid and unique via AJAX in the background.
  4. The validation routing sets an attribute on the user using setAttribute() that contains the entered email address.
  5. We close the Lightbox and initiate a Facebook Connect request with FB.Connect.requireSession
  6. In our createFbUser() method we get the attribute back and save it with the new user

Bam. Got the user’s email address and logged them in via FB Connect.

FOSS Fridays: sfSCMIgnoresTaskPlugin version 1.0.3 released – Doctrine Supported

By Matt Daum | Leave a Comment on FOSS Fridays: sfSCMIgnoresTaskPlugin version 1.0.3 released – Doctrine Supported

In the past we have always used Propel as our main ORM for our Symfony projects. Recently with Doctrine becoming the default ORM for Symfony 1.3 we decided we should make sure our plugin supports Doctrine. For those who don’t know about the plugin, it automatically creates ignores for your Source Code Management(SCM) if you use Git or CVS. When you have a large project it gets tiring to create all the different ignores for all the bases, logs, configuration files and such.

Let us know if you find any problems with Doctrine support or have any additional suggestions for the plugin.

More information on the plugin can be found on the Symfony Plugins site: http://www.symfony-project.org/plugins/sfSCMIgnoresTaskPlugin

You can download the most recent pear package manually at: http://plugins.symfony-project.org/get/sfSCMIgnoresTaskPlugin/sfSCMIgnoresTaskPlugin-1.0.3.tgz

or you can install it via:

./symfony plugin:install sfSCMIgnoresTaskPlugin

FOSS Fridays: MacGyvered Key/Value in Symfony

By Ashish Datta | 3 Comments on FOSS Fridays: MacGyvered Key/Value in Symfony

On a project we’re currently working on, we arrived at a situation where our client had a loose and very fluid idea of the information he wanted to store about certain objects in his application. We didn’t specifically know the number of fields or the format of the data. Continually modifying the schema would of been painful so I wanted to try something different.

Since the data is more or less non-relational (it only relates to the object that owns it), what I really wanted was an ad-hoc key/value store. But I didn’t want to break Propel’s ORM abstractions. I still wanted to be able to do:

$company->getMission();

With the new system.

Turns out you basically can. Here’s how it works:

  1. Add a “dynamic_field” table to your schema. (definition is below)
  2. Override the __call(), hydrate(), and save() functions in Propel model file that you want to MacGyver.
  3. Pray.

Definition of the dynamic_field table:

So the idea is we want to basically build a Propel Behaviour to capture any undefined get/set calls and “get” the data out of the dynamic_field table or “set” the data by storing the value into the table. Since the table stores the model class and model id, the “keys” only have to be unique by model (just like Propel normally works).

Here is the code you need to add to the model file:

The code captures any undefined get/set calls and then deals with them appropriately. It won’t serialize the fields until the save() call (just like regular Propel objects). I also overloaded the hydrate() function so that the object will fetch all of its dynamic fields in one shot, as opposed one query per get.

Using the modified objects is exactly like regular Propel objects, the changes are entirely transparent except that you can get/set anything you want.

For example:

Will work even though there is no “vision” column on the company table. Magic.

There is one big problem with this trick though. Because of the Propel class hierarchy, there isn’t any way to introduce this code in one file and have other objects inherit the changes. You have to manually copy it to any model file that you want to enable it for.

FOSS Fridays: OpenSSL in PHP

By Ashish Datta | Leave a Comment on FOSS Fridays: OpenSSL in PHP

Well Twitter has “Follow Fridays” so I thought we should do FOSS Fridays. I don’t really have a plan for this and it might not last but let’s see where it goes.

In the last few days a couple of people have asked for tips on how to use OpenSSL from PHP. So here is a snippet on how to do it. This comes out of an application that provides a shared authentication system between our client’s LDAP system and their partner’s systems.

It works like so:

  1. Users login to the application using their LDAP credentials.
  2. When the users request to visit the partner site, our system packages up their login information, encrypts it, signs it, and shoots it along with the user to the partner site.
  3. Next, the partner checks if the user has an account and if they do it logs them in. Otherwise, it creates them a new account and logs them in.

All of this is done transparently so that the user doesn’t know they’ve actually left the original site.

Here is the code to do it. PS. it’s from a Symfony application.

The net result of all of this is an encrypted payload with the user’s credentials and a signature of the payload. The payload is encrypted with “their” public key and then signed with “our” private key. This ensures that only they can open the package and only we can generate valid signatures.

Happy Friday!

Iterating over Symfony Forms for Custom Output

By Matt Daum | 4 Comments on Iterating over Symfony Forms for Custom Output

Recently we were working on a project in which we needed to switch from forms auto-formatting themselves ( <?php echo $form;?>) to allow for much more customization in the output.   While there is a Symfony Forms for Designers chapter in the forms documentation, it doesn’t help much for iterating over a form object and customizing the output.  There is a simple foreach($form as $field) that will iterate over every field in the form.  The problem with this is when you have embedded forms and you want to do something different with the formatting on them.  This will iterate over all the fields and you will not know when the field is the embedded form or not.  So we came up with the following which works:

This will work fine for a form with as many as single embedded forms.  It allows you to easily use the same view for multiple forms and be able to customize their embedded forms easily.  If you have only one form that you will be doing this with, and are worried about performance we recommend then not using a foreach loop and doing it by hand, this will save you on performance as you will not have as many if statements in each iteration.