Ezzatron

This is just a quick post to provide a landing page for a new symfony plugin I’ve created: sfFilesystemFixturesPlugin. I’m not going to explain the plugin in detail here, all the information you need is on the plugin’s readme page.

In a nutshell, the plugin lets you populate a symfony project with filesystem data like images and thumbnails in much the same way as you would populate a database using regular symfony fixtures.

Feel free to leave questions, comments, and bug reports in the comments.

UPDATE:

I have now packaged this script into a symfony plugin called sfEnvironmentFixturesPlugin. Check it out and hit the ‘I use it’ link if you find it useful!

Feel free to leave questions, comments, and bug reports in the comments.

…

Symfony‘s fixtures are a great way to set up initial data and/or test data for a system. Whenever I create a new symfony project however, I always find myself wishing there was an easy way to specify which fixtures contain data required for production systems (the ‘initial’ data) and which contain data that I only need when developing (the ‘test’ data).

I recently started such a project and came across a reasonably elegant solution. With a simple YAML file placed in your fixtures directory, you too can have such a set up if so desired.

(more…)

I recently started learning how to use the forms system in symfony 1.2 and for the most part I was impressed with its simplicity and flexibility. Unfortunately I was thrown in the deep end somewhat when a project I was working on had a requirement for an “expanding” form – that is, one where a certain section of a form should be able to be repeated as many times as necessary to accommodate the user’s needs.

In the case of the project in question, the specific situation was an application form where the user could fill out any number of team members involved in their project. Each team member consisted of a name and a role, both free-form text fields. Team members were to be stored in the database, linked to the application in a one to many relationship.

Circumstances conspired that this must be achieved in a single form, so full of confidence in symfony’s design decisions regarding the forms system, a bit of light Googling revealed the answer – symfony’s embedded forms system. Great, so you just plonk in a few embedded forms and away you go, right? Wrong.

The good news is, I managed to find a solution that satisfied the requirements, eventually. The bad news is that it is not easy, elegant, or particularly reusable.

What follows is a loose guide to implementing such a system. Being a relative newcomer to symfony I cannot guarantee that this is the best way to do things, so tread with caution, and if you think of a better way to achieve the same outcome, please please let me know! Read on if you dare… (more…)