default_culture:   en
// No problem, en is treated as a string 
// and /en/ is automatically added to links
 
default_culture: no
// Oops, no is translated by Symfony 
// the same way as false, 0 or off, giving it a boolean value!
 
default_culture: 'no'
// That's better, now you will have the intended results.

The same applies to any yml files that you may have “keywords” in, so try to always use quotes round everything that is not boolean, integer, etc.

http://propel.jondh.me.uk/

It’s developed by a Symfony user, and allows you to type in sql statements using nested braces for prioritising. The form will then return a nicely formatted block of Propel code.

It’s not perfect, and it doesn’t cover everything just yet, but it’s great for getting some ideas about the structure and how to use various criteria - it’s also spot on if you are trying to learn Propel and already know how to structure SQL statements.

Discuss this tool and/or contribute on the Symfony Forum

Using a combination of tools like this, and taking a look at the generated files in lib/model/om should give you a good push, and a bit of a shortcut to more complex queries than you may be used to - rather than having to trawl the Propel documentation.

Symfony does not delete these unused files when you run a build, so they will stack up and cause Propel errors, for example when calling propel-dump-data.

Of course you can safely delete the lib/om and lib/map folders and run the build again, but you should manually delete the relevant files in /lib as there could be some user generated content in there also. These files are unlikely to cause any errors but might as well be deleted as part of your clean up since they are effectively useless if you have removed their referenced tables from the schema.

As your site grows, and you add more and more config to the app.yml file, be very careful not to re-declare the same named element. Symfony will not warn you, and there will be no errors - but the second (lower) instance will simple overwrite the first!

For example, if you have forgotten that you already have an element called profile hiding near the top of the file, and you add another one called profile at the bottom, with all your profile page settings - the lower one will destroy the one higher in the file.

This can be hard to spot if you have been meticulously coding and added a default value to all your sfConfig::get() calls because chances are when you are developing the site, all your defaults will be the same as the ones you have specified in app.yml.

The problem will become apparent when an end user tries to change the configuration and the change is ignored, because Symfony is simply using the default value rather than the one the user thinks they are setting.

Careful out there kids!

UTF-8 characters can be multi-byte, and strlen() returns the length of the string in bytes, which means the string ååå would actually have a “length” of 6.

One solution is to use the multibyte function “mb_strlen” instead, you will need to have PHP compiled with this - but it seems to be a default in later versions.

E.g.

$value = "ÅØÆbob";
echo strlen($value);
// 9
 
echo mb_strlen($value, 'UTF-8');
// 6

For example, when using ajax calls you may be rendering text directly from actions, or you may be throwing exceptions which have meaningful error messages which are displayed by the template. You need to remember to “i18nalise” this text too…

From an action, you can access the i18n function via the context singleton, as documented by the Symfony docs (http://www.symfony-project.org/book/1_0/13-I18n-and-L10n)

$this->getContext()->getI18n()->__("yourtexthere");

Remember to do it now, and you won’t kick yourself later!

If you are using the symfony image_tag helper and not specifying your own alt attribute, then it will be the image name minus the extension, for example - if your template contains this link:

<?php echo link_to(image_tag("fred.jpg"), "@somewhere")) ?>

then in your Functional test, use:

$b->click("fred");

The easy solution is to add /* to the end of your routing rule, so that any other parameters are allowed.

E.g.

myroute:
  url:   /somewhere/:userid/*
  param: { module: myModule, action: myAction }
 
mynextroute:
  url: etc

Now your routing functions will add any extra parameters as necessary.

There is a bug in Symfony’s email validator which means that unless you use both modes (strict and non-strict) invalid email addresses are possible.

Time of writing we are at version 1.0.13 - this could well be (and probably will be) fixed in 1.1 but please let me know if you spot that this has been fixed beforehand.

Strict mode validation

This mode is intended to catch email addresses such as root@localhost, but unfortunately it does not check for valid email strings, so %,%@hotmail.com would be accepted, as well as many other illegal character combinations.

Non-strict mode

This mode checks that the email address contains legal characters, but does not check for internal addresses. This is fine for most cases, but it is worth restricting users from using your site to spam your local mail server.

Solution 1

Sapheriel suggests on his blog that one solution is to override the functionality of the class, and then restore it once an update has been released.

“The best way to achieve this with the least amount of intrusion is to copy sfEmailValidator.class.php into your project’s library folder, modify it, and delete it once a fix has been published”

This may suit many users

Solution 2

If you do not want to worry about something you may have to do in the future, you can also run the validator twice, for example in your validator.yml file:

DoubleCheckEmailValidator:
  class: sfEmailValidator
  param:
    class: sfGuardUser
    column: email
    strict: true
    email_error: This email address is invalid
 
fields:
  email:
    required:
      msg: Please enter an email address
    sfEmailValidator:
      email_error: This email address is invalid
      strict: false
    sfPropelUniqueValidator:
      class: sfGuardUser
      column: email
      unique_error: This email is already in use
    doubleCheckEmailValidator:

You could also write a custom validator which calls the email validator twice, however we have opted for this solution for now.

Thanks to June for the content.

Other than some Java training at university, and the odd borrowed third-party classes (notably phpclasses.org) my PHP background up to this point was purely based on procedural style programming. I’d worked on some big projects, some I’m proud of and some I really want to go back to and rewrite from scratch, a sentence I’m sure you will hear from many “code monkeys”.

Symfony for me, was my first breach into the much hyped object oriented style PHP5 - and a whole new way of thinking. In the following articles, I hope to share with you the experiences I have had, with PHP5, Symfony and any other related technologies that I stumble across.

One of the things I have realised in the last few weeks, is that when searching for answers to problems that are not well documented, the most common results are in the form of developer blogs. Some of these have been invaluable to me and I’d like to credit them here, I’d also like this to become one of those blogs - since some of the answers I have sought have not been so easily forthcoming.