Chris Sedlmayr

Essential JavaScript and jQuery design patterns, free kindle book

2011-10-10T00:00:00-07:00

For those of you familiar with the book, quite simply here is a Kindle compatible version.
For those of you unfamiliar, It's an excellent JavaScript and jQuery Design Patterns book written by Addy Osmani and provided for free.
You can read all about the book over at addyosmani.com

I've converted it for Kindle compatibility, and it's provided here as a download (with permission from Addy of course).

Download Essential JavaScript and jQuery design patterns for Kindle

It's always worth keeping an eye on Addy's site as the book is frequently updated there, also it's usually a good source of information anyway and Addy has published some interesting article of late.
As Addy releases new versions of the book i'll endeavour to keep the kindle version up to date here.

Kindle Version Last Updated: 18th July 2011 (1.0)

Auto persistent url params in symfony 1.4

2011-07-18T00:00:00-07:00

Imagine you have various pages and routes within your application, maybe you are displaying data based on some URL parameters (filters for example).

If you want to persist your filters between pages then you have a few choices.

You could store the filters in the user's session making it easy, but they are not visible as a URL parameter.
You could modify or create a new link_to/url_for function then modify your templates to use the new function.

Neither of these appealed to me, I wanted the filters to be in the URL, and I didn't want to modify each link_to usage.

What I have done is created a new custom routing class.
The class is invoked by configuring a route to use it, and you also tell it which URL params you want to persist.

dashboard:
  url:   /dashboard
  class: ictPersistentParamRoute
  options:
    persist: [param1, param2]
  param: { module: dashboard, action: show }

The class extends sfRoute and overrides the generate() method.
At URL generation time (usage of url_for/link_to etc) the class checks if the route has persist options defined, and looks at sfWebRequest to see if these parameters are present. If they are it will retrieve their values and merge the values to those defined in the (link_to) params.

This makes it very easy to add persistent params to your application without much effort!

<?php
class ictPersistentParamRoute extends sfRoute
{
    public function generate($params, $context = array(), $absolute = false)
    {
        // our work happens here
    }
}

New sfNavBuilderPlugin for symfony 1.4

2011-06-07T00:00:00-07:00

I released this plugin yesterday, which offers a simple interface with which to define and render your symfony 1.4 menu's

The plugin allows you to create a hierarchical menu, with each item having it's active state defined by;

Current module
Current action
Parameter=value

This therefore allows you to say you want an item to be active if;

module = blogPost
action = show
a paramName of post_id = a paramValue of 1

Basic usage example

One main menu item, with 2 child items

    <?php
    // create a menu item for the about page
    $homepage = new sfNavBuilderItem();
    $homepage
        ->setDisplayName('About Us')
        ->setUrl(url_for('about'))
        ->addActivateWhen(array(
            'module' => array('about'),
            'action' => array('index')
        ));
    // create a menu item for the about the team page and define the parent
    $team = new sfNavBuilderItem();
    $team
        ->setDisplayName('About the Team')
        ->setUrl(url_for('aboutTeam'))
        ->addActivateWhen(array(
            'module' => array('about'),
            'action' => array('team')
        ))
        ->setParent($homepage);
    // create a menu item for the about the company page and define the parent
    $company = new sfNavBuilderItem();
    $company
        ->setDisplayName('About the Company')
        ->setUrl(url_for('aboutCompany'))
        ->addActivateWhen(array(
            'module' => array('about'),
            'action' => array('company')
        ))
        ->setParent($homepage);

    // put the items into a menu instance and provide the required info
    $this->menu = new sfNavBuilder();
    $this->menu
        ->setRequest($request)
        ->setModule($this->getContext()->getModuleName())
        ->setAction($this->getContext()->getActionName())
        ->addItem($homepage);

    // in your template you can then call the renderer
    <?php echo $menu->render(); ?>
    // check out the sfNavBuilderRenderer class to see what this does

I have included some fuller examples of use within the readme of the project, but am happy to answer question you have when using it.

Project page on github
sfNavBuilderPlugin Project site

Hope you find it useful!

Curl and xmllint play nicely together

2011-05-05T00:00:00-07:00

If you work a lot with XML API's (writing or consuming), and have ever called one directly using curl to test/debug some output, you may find that the output isn't very friendly, and for larger responses it's almost unreadable.

By using curl and xmllint together you can have your response nicely formatted.

To do so, invoke curl, and parse the response through xmllint, giving xmllint the --format option and the - option which tells it to read from stdin

curl -sL "http://api.example.com/assets.xml" | xmllint --format -

The curl options used here are -s to invoke silent mode, and -L so it follows redirects.

Read more about xmllint here or view the man pages directly if you have it installed.

Textmate tip, Automatic PHP spl_autoload class name from file path

2010-06-30T00:00:00-07:00

The title says it all so i'll just get on with it.

Create a new textmate command, and set the output to 'Insert as snippet'
Paste in the following.

#!/usr/bin/php
<?php
$path = $_ENV['TM_FILEPATH'];
$path = trim($path, '/');
$path = trim($path, '.php');
$parts = explode('/', $path);
$lastPart = end($parts);
echo 'class ';
foreach ($parts as $id => $part) {
    // textmate placeholders start at 1
    $id = $id+1;
    if ($lastPart == $part) {
        echo '${'.$id.':'.$part.'}';
    } else {
        echo '${'.$id.':'.$part.'_}';
    }
}
?>

And bind to a tab trigger.
When you execute from within a file it performs the following.

Retrieves the full path of the file you are in.
Removes any forward slashes from the beginning and end of the path.
Removes the .php extension from the end of the file.
Explodes each part of the path, seperated by a slash (/) into an array.
Gets the pointer for the last item in the array.
echo's 'class'
Then iterates through the array, creating a textmate snippet placeholder for each one, all of which have the required underscore (_) apart from the last one.

So for a file that is in the path /The/Full/Path/Filename.php
We end up with the resulting snippet of

${1:The_}${2:Full_}${3:Path_}${4:Filename}

Which then enables you to tab through them and remove those from the start that you don't need.
You could go a step further and only spit out the last 3 parts as that is generally how many are needed for a class name. But it really depends on your app structure so I've left it as is for now.

Check out the image for the options

Update:

I've made a version that gives you just the last 3 parts of the path as mentioned above.
I have both running on the 'class' tab command so can choose between them as required.

#!/usr/bin/php
<?php
$path = $_ENV['TM_FILEPATH'];
$path = trim($path, '/');
$path = trim($path, '.php');
$parts = explode('/', $path);
echo 'class ';
// do this 3 times
for($i = 1; $i <= 3; $i++) {
  $varName = 'part_'.$i;
  $part = array_pop($parts);
  if ($i == 1) {
    $$varName = '${'.$i.':'.$part.'}';
  } else {
    $$varName = '${'.$i.':'.$part.'_}';
  }
}
// pass the snippet to the file
echo $part_3.$part_2.$part_1;
?>

Automatically renaming multiple files by rule

2010-05-16T00:00:00-07:00

I recently had the need to rename a bunch of files according to a simple rule.
In the directory, any files that had a prefix of "Gee" should have the prefix changed to "Kif"
After a little digging I found a simple but quite tasty solution.
Simply run this at your command line.

for f in Gee_*; do mv "$f" "Kif_${f#Gee_}"; done

Job done. It finds files matching the pattern supplied, then loops through renaming them appropriately.

It's worth noting this isn't recursive so will only complete for files in your current directory.

Git pull and git merge between developers

2010-04-15T00:00:00-07:00

I use git locally, but the main upstream repo is an SVN one, there are also a couple of other devs that also use git locally.
We are using git svn as the bridge between these 2.

If we want to share code or update each other it was generally the case that we would have to commit everything back to svn (git svn dcommit), then the others would have to rebase.
It felt like I was abusing git and not making the most of it.

Enter git pull

Git pull allows you to grab code from another git repo and store it in your local repo.

Git pull

I'll presume you already have a git repo locally, and that there is another git repo somewhere you have access to.

First of all we add the remote location.

git remote add mp git.user@mpdevbox:/www/cm/

Let me break that command down

git remote add = The git command
mp = A friendly name you use for this remote location
git.user@mpdevbox = the remote user and the remote location
:/www/cm = The path to the remote git repo, (note the colon)

Having completed that command you now have a reference to a remote git repo, If you want to pull the code down from it, it's simple (you may want to create and checkout a branch before you do so, depending on your needs. I won't so will just pull)

git pull mp master

Where master is the name of your local branch you want to pull into.

This will pull down the code from the remote branch and merge it into your branch, if that all goes OK it will then perform a commit, if you don't wan the commit then just add --no-commit to the end of the pull command

If there are conflicts that git fails to resolve automatically then you will need to resolve them manually.
This can be easily done using mergetool

git mergetool

and follow the instructions.

On Mac this will open a merge/diff client which lets you easily choose from your local and the pulled down repo. Once done you can commit if you want, there is even a pre-filled commit message for you about the merge.

It's as simple as that really, this approach also makes it much easier to develop on multiple machines, without having to get rid of SVN as your main repo (which depending on circumstances, requirements, or the people that make those decisions, may not be an easy sell).

Git Manuals, Docs and Handy Links

2010-04-06T00:00:00-07:00

As i am a recent git convert I find myself reading a lot of guides etc on the best way to use git and how my workflow can change now i'm using a DVCS.

This is an attempt to collate my more useful findings, partly for myself, but it may prove useful for you too.

Combining multiple git commits into 1 SVN commit

In some cases I use git as a local repo, but the main repo upstream is SVN. This sample enables me to combine multiple local git commits into a single commit back to SVN. This was taken from Stack Overflow

git tag local # create a temporary tag
git reset --hard trunk
git merge --squash local
git commit # write your single commit message here
git svn dcommit
git tag -d local # delete the temporary tag named local</code>

Delicious I also tend to bookmark a lot of stuff over at Delicious so you can check out my git stuff there too. Items tagged 'Git' at my Delicious

Zebra Striping with PHP the Easy Way

2010-03-16T00:00:00-07:00

Using one of the built in Maths functions of PHP we can easily create zebra striped lists.
Let's say we have an array of entries stored within the $comments variable.
All we have to do with this is to use the fmod function and assign a css class that alternates per entry.

<ul>
    <?php foreach ($comments as $int => $comment): ?>
        <li class="<?php echo fmod($int, 2) ? 'even' : 'odd' ?>">
    <?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

Then just give the even and odd classes different colours to suit your layout.

li.even {
  background-color:#FFFFFF;
  color:#000000;
}
 
li.odd {
  background-color:#000000;
  color:#FFFFFF;
}

And you're done!

Using helpers within an action in symfony 1.0

2010-03-16T00:00:00-07:00

If you ever need to use a helper outside a template, you can still load a helper group from anywhere by calling

<?php
sfLoader::loadHelpers($helpers)

where $helpers is a helper group name or an array of helper group names. For instance, if you want to use simple_format_text() in an action, you need to call

<?php
sfLoader::loadHelpers('Text');

I know this is covered in the symfony docs but it's a fairly handy thing to know so thought I would make it easier to find.

The use of 301 rewrite

2010-03-16T00:00:00-07:00

If you are hosting a domain (or multiple domains) using VirtualHost entries, it is bad practice to use individual entries for the same domain just to cover the inclusion or exclusion of the www in the address, amongst other things it is bad for SEO, but of course you still want visitors to be able to go to your site via the 2 starting addresses http://sedlmayr.co.uk and http://www.sedlmayr.co.uk

For example you should not have an entry for www.sedlmayr.co.uk and another for sedlmayr.co.uk There are a few ways you can do this but have found this particular one to be effective. Whatever url you go to; http://sedlmayr.co.uk or http://www.sedlmayr.co.uk a redirect happens on the http://sedlmayr.co.uk that sends you to http://www.sedlmayr.co.uk.

But what about people that go to specific pages such as http://sedlmayr.co.uk/services

We use a RewriteRule so that whatever is after the domain itself (in this case services)(When using http://sedlmayr.co.uk) http://sedlmayr.co.uk/services is shown as http://www.sedlmayr.co.uk/services It is very simple to achieve this.

Within you VirtualHost entry you need to specify a ServerAlias. So I would have

ServerName www.sedlmayr.co.uk
ServerAlias sedlmayr.co.uk

And then within the vhost file for your project you would have

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^sedlmayr\.co.uk
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.sedlmayr.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

Which needs to go at the top. That's it! Hope this is helpful to you at some point.

Imagemagick sfThumbnailPlugin fix for scaling under symfony 1.0

2010-03-16T00:00:00-07:00

I've been using the sfThumbnail Plugin in symfony 1.0 for image resizing when users upload.
When I asked the plugin to resize an image with scaling there was a problem and the image came out skewed and distorted.
After a little research I found the following fix.

Once you have installed the plugin, edit the sfImageMagickAdapter.class.php in the plugin dir.

Change lines 223-237:

From

<?php
$width  = $this->sourceWidth;
$height = $this->sourceHeight;
$x = $y = 0;
switch (@$this->options['method']) {
  case "shave_all":
    if ($width > $height)
    {
      $x = ceil(($width - $height) / 2 );
      $width = $height;
    }
    elseif ($height > $width)
    {
      $y = ceil(($height - $width) / 2);
      $height = $width;
    }

<?php
$width  = $this->sourceWidth;
$height = $this->sourceHeight;
$mWidth = $this->maxWidth;
$mHeight = $this->maxHeight;
$x = $y = 0;
switch (@$this->options['method']) {
  case "shave_all":
    if ($width > $height)
    {
      $x = ceil(($width - ($height*$mWidth)/$mHeight) / 2 );
      $width = $height;
    }
    elseif ($height > $width)
    {
      $y = ceil(($height - $width*($mHeight/$mWidth)) / 2);
      $height = $width;
    }

It's a straight forward edit so you should be able to see why this simple change has the desired effect, and your images will now behave nicely when scaling.

How-to collapse the web debug toolbar in symfony 1.0 by default

2010-03-16T00:00:00-07:00

To automatically collapse, hide, shrink (or whatever you want to call it) the web debug toolbar to just the SF and close icons; add this line

window.onload=sfWebDebugToggleMenu;

to the end of this file

...\symfony\web\sf\sf_web_debug\js\main.js

This handy little tip courtesy of IsRobot.

Chris Sedlmayr

Essential JavaScript and jQuery design patterns, free kindle book

Auto persistent url params in symfony 1.4

New sfNavBuilderPlugin for symfony 1.4

Basic usage example

Curl and xmllint play nicely together

Textmate tip, Automatic PHP spl_autoload class name from file path

Update:

Automatically renaming multiple files by rule

Git pull and git merge between developers

Enter git pull

Git pull

Git Manuals, Docs and Handy Links

Git Books

Git-SVN Resources

Full Git online manual

Combining multiple git commits into 1 SVN commit

Zebra Striping with PHP the Easy Way

Using helpers within an action in symfony 1.0

The use of 301 rewrite

Imagemagick sfThumbnailPlugin fix for scaling under symfony 1.0

How-to collapse the web debug toolbar in symfony 1.0 by default