Very quick post today, but I’m recently migrating a MySQL database to a Postgres one because the guys using it want to now take advantage of the geographical possibilities of Postgres. Some tables were very easy to migrate with very basic scripts however for some of them with lots of relations to each other, I wanted to take advantage of using an ORM to make things more simple for myself.
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There’s a problem many people seem to encounter in Symfony2 and that appears when you start using the ACL component for security along with Doctrine. The ACL defines an object’s identity based on its class name and an id retrieved from a ‘getId’ method if one exists or from a getIdentifier method if the object implements the DomainObject interface. Continue reading
I ran into a few issues running tests for a symfony2 project that seems to be common to many people once your test suite starts to be more important. One of the common issues that people encounter is that the number of PDO connections allowed was maxed out. Doctrine keeps the connections alive in case a re-use is needed, but for now doesn’t close the connections once the Kernel shuts down (see: https://github.com/symfony/symfony/issues/2672). This issue has been closed as not related to Symfony, but I can’t figure out whether it’s been updated in the Doctrine bundle. So far it doesn’t seem so.
The workaround proposed in the 2 issues referencing that problem has allowed me to do a few more tests until the same problem appeared again. The solution that works best for me was to actually close the Doctrine connection on the tearDown of the PHPUnit test like this:
Now I run all my tests without ever having this issue come up again.
Even better, my tests run WAY faster than they did before! The normal test run is between 10 to 30% faster like this. But running the tests with code coverage now takes me less than half of the time it did before this change.
I recently found on Coil’s blog, here: http://www.strangebuzz.com/post/2012/01/28/Load-fixtures-with-Symfony2 how he went about creating fixtures from Yaml files in Symfony2. This is something that I’ve been willing to have for a while.
But I needed more than just loading the data from Yaml. My need for easy to use fixtures comes from testing and setting up the database for test purposes. Fixtures can have many different needs. You might need some of them in production because they bootstrap your database (for example set the client_contract possible status to prospect, proposal, signed_contract in a contract_status table), some of them are required for development. And some of them for testing of course and for testing you might even want different possible cases.
Based on this idea I created a new bundle for this purpose: https://github.com/khepin/KhepinYamlFixturesBundle
The bundle allows you to define fixture files in the YAML format of course. You have a command line tool to load all your fixtures in database. As well as a service living in the DIC so that you can load fixtures in your test setup function.
The bundle provides a notion of “contexts” which might be the ‘production’, ‘test’, ‘dev’ cases we just talked about for example. This allows you to either load only the standards fixtures or load the standard ones plus the ones specific of a given context.
Well that’s it for now, but I hope it helps many of you I’ve seen looking for this on the interwebs. Any feedback is welcome to help make it more usable for not just me.
If you’ve ever used FOS user bundle, they handle all the translation for you for the form’s field labels. Whenever a translation is not there, you see the field’s id instead of seeing any label based on the field’s name like this is usually the case.
This seemed pretty cool to me and I couldn’t help but keep thinking “I want that too”. The reason is that my translations are based on “keys” instead of the actual text. So if my label reads “Contact person’s email”, I’d have to have a key with this name. But when I change this label in English to “Contact’s email” then I would have to change all the keys in the translation files. Which … I don’t want to!
The other day I explained the problem I had: when you build a SaaS service, each customer’s data must be seen by him and him only. It would be a disaster if one of your customers could see it’s competitors data so this has to be taken seriously.
I call these “realms” though I have no idea if this is a standard term for this or not, but to me it represents the fact that you lock each piece of data into separate parts that can not be accessed from one another.
So all my data, all the entity classes and all the database tables have a special field that makes an association from this entity to the realm (a client company of the product in this case).
First of all and before getting started, today has been declared to be #bloggerlove day by @caefer over there so be sure to leave comments on the blogs you like and read. As he says, bloggers make our lives easier and share a lot of expertise in many different domains. It’s always great when you’ve spent hours researching on something and put some more time to try and explain it to receive a simple ‘thanks’. Or if you don’t want to comment here, you can always send a postcard to @fabpot! Ok, now on to today’s problem!
As I am currently starting my company (http://linads.com), some parts of the app I am building need to be highly dynamic. At the core of the app is a planning management that is pretty complex because it needs:
If you want something like this to be simple to use and browse through, you can’t show everything at once but need to let the user view more details where he needs to without ever leaving the page.
In this post I’ll try to explain how I use Symfony and a handful of JS libraries together to make this work.
Simple one for today!
For business apps, people are not really confident with the idea of using a “remember me” option on login. Because the security of your financial data prevails over the pain of logging in every time you want to use the app.
As I installed FOSUserBundle, the login form always shows a remember me checkbox. I wanted to not only get rid of that in the template, but also make sure that the possibility to do so was actually disabled server side.