Archive for the ‘symfony’ Category

Retrieving a random record in Symfony using Propel

Monday, April 21st, 2008

Just a quicky, as I had to spend 10 mins looking this up hopefully it’ll save someone else time later.

I need to retrieve a random user from the users table, but didn’t know how to express a random record… this method will return a single random user, or can take an argument to return more than 1
UserPeer

	public static function getRandomUsers($num=1){
		$c = new Criteria();
		$c->addAscendingOrderByColumn('rand()');
		$c->setLimit($num);
		$users = UserPeer::doSelect($c);
		return $users;	
	}

Simple. (and probably documented better somewhere else)

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Written by baj | Posted on April 21st, 2008 in symfony |

Posted in symfony | 3 Comments »

Using observe_field to update an input

Saturday, April 19th, 2008

Had an issue on Acme Video Website where I want to prepopulate some content on a form element after making an ajax call to a 3rd party API.

Problems comes, in that observe_field (part of the prototype javascript library), is designed to update a div, so I was incorrectly trying to do this:

echo observe_field('hint', array(
'update' => "tags",
'url' => '@embargo_helper',
'with' => "'hint=' + $('hint').value",
'loading' => "'Loading...'"
));

So it should take the value of the hints input element, go off to the 3rd party api, grab the info I need then pop it into the input that has an id of tags … only that doesn’t work, of course.

So what’s the solution?
Ok, a 3 step process, firstly we need to add script = true in our observe_field parameters, letting the observe_field know that it’s going to have script returned that it will need to execute

echo observe_field('hint', array(
'update' => "tags",
'url' => '@embargo_helper',
'with' => "'hint=' + $('hint').value",
'loading' => "'Loading...'",
'script' => true
));

note: true without quotes.

Next, here’s a look at my action, of course it’s not really that important, you do whatever you need to do here:

Action

  public function executeHelper(){
  	$this->description = myTools::getDescriptionFromHint($this->getRequestParameter('hint'));
  }

Then you need to edit the view to execute some javascript:

View

<?php $sf_context->getResponse()->setContentType('text/javascript') ?>
$('tags').value = '<?php echo $description;?>';

And there we go…

…now, I’m not entirely happy with this for 2 reasons. Firstly, the update parameter of the observe_field call is now redundant, and secondly, the id of the input we want to update is now harded in the view, so to at least get around that, we can add an extra parameter in the with part of observe_field like this:

echo observe_field('hint', array(
'update' => "tags",
'url' => '@embargo_helper',
'with' => "'hint=' + $('hint').value+ '&updateid=tags'",
'loading' => "'Loading...'",
'script' => true
));

…so now we are letting our symfony code know what ID we want to update, so lets re-edit the action to take this into account:

Action

  public function executeHelper(){
  	$this->description = myTools::getDescriptionFromHint($this->getRequestParameter('hint'));
        $this->updateid = $this->getRequestParameter('updateid');
  }

and then let the view know which id it needs to update:

View

<?php $sf_context->getResponse()->setContentType('text/javascript') ?>
$('<?php echo $updateid;?>').value = '<?php echo $description;?>';

I’m sure there’s a neater way of doing this, but hell, got it working anyway.

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Written by baj | Posted on April 19th, 2008 in symfony |

Posted in symfony | No Comments »

Before and After Actions

Friday, April 18th, 2008

Ever wanted to run some functions or create some variables before every action in a module? Or ever wanted to do something crafty after every action and before the template gets displayed?

Even if your answer is no, its good to be aware for future projects, that Symfony is hiding some very valuable methods of doing such things. Read on…

For doing stuff before every action in your module, just create a new function called preExecute() like so:

class demomoduleActions extends sfActions
{
  public function preExecute()
  {
    // ... put your stuff here that you want to run before every Action ...
  }
}

Equally for doing anything you like after every action in your module just create a new function called postExecute() like so:

class demomoduleActions extends sfActions
{
  public function postExecute()
  {
    // ... put your stuff here that you want to run after every Action ...
  }
}

It really is as simple as that. I stumbled across a little while ago whilst working on a project for a client of mine. So I thought I’d share this with you all.

Cheers,
Rob

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