There used to be a feed (RSS) maintained by Sensio that aggregated all the feeds of publicized “Symfony Bloggers”. People would go post their blog’s feed here: http://trac.symfony-project.org/wiki/SymfonyBloggers and then their feeds would be auto-magically merged into the “Symfony Blog Quotes” feed. This tool was of great use to me. I read most of the posts (when in a language I could speak!) and learned a lot. Sadly this went down a few months ago.

UPDATE: This article was written while trying the form system and represents my thoughts at a certain stage, in order to discuss and get feedback. Not all info here is valuable and some is actually mis-leading. If you read this, make sure you read the comments as well, or wait for a coming article with more correct foundations. Reading these articles in a series (starting with this one) will get you through most of the thought process, and help understand the reasons behind the good practices.

UPDATE: This article was written while trying the form system and represents my thoughts at a certain stage, in order to discuss and get feedback. Not all info here is valuable and some is actually mis-leading. If you read this, make sure you read the comments as well, or wait for a coming article with more correct foundations. Reading these articles in a series (followed by this one) will get you through most of the thought process, and help understand the reasons behind the good practices.

Although Symfony2 is not there yet, there is already a framework based on some of the Symfony core components, it’s the Silex microframework. It’s created by Fabien Potencier, the original developer of the Symfony framework and Igor Wiedler. Silex is really easy for setting up a small new project and you can download the whole of it in one single file. It’s PHP 5.3 only as it makes use of namespaces and closures quite a lot.

Wow! That is one long title! But this is actually all the things that I’m gonna try to put together in this article. On a technical point of view, it is a follow up to my previous article on simple excel exports from within Symfony. The other part is about simple reporting system to be used in PHP and how to do it. The article is quite long, if you don’t give a $#@&%!

Shame shame shame on me… still writing about symfony not 2 when all the momentum has gone to a version th at brings things to the next level. However I’ll talk about things related to the form framework here and from what I hear, a lot of this has been kept in symfony2. Whether true or not, many out there will keep working on symfony 1.x for a while because well the project already exists / has to be maintained or keep going and new symfony version doesn’t mean that every website using it will change and update tomorrow!

[update]: I published a new article with other (and in my opinion way better) methods on how to do those things. In the application we are creating we need to output some of out content as excel documents. Most of the times the actions that are going to be used are the same as when we output html content. You have a list of contacts for a given company, but the user wants to get it as an excel file so he can manipulate it a bit, same goes for the contracts list, the products list etc etc etc…

We just had this problem where our routing file for our application was getting bigger and bigger and huger and huger. The same thing of course is happening to the file in which we define our schema. However it is already planned that you can split your schema file. Any file named *.schema.yml located at the same place as the initial one would be used as a schema. However right now my issue was more with the routes.

Here’s the case: you want (badly!) to add a form to an existing one through ajax. You know, like it wasn’t there the minute before but was only one click away! You want to make that click and have all the new form fields appear right here right now for your own pleasure! This new form of course is one of a related object. We’ll say for example that you have a table of customers and one to store addresses.

How to sort lists on any field even the one of joined tables? This post is almost a followup to the previous one on filtering with joined tables. But what we want to do here is to add the ability to sort a list of objects (based on model objects in the database) and to add it conveniently to any action that returns a list. The idea is that we would still use the same model: