Small Hacks for a Large World
Jon Lebensold writes; This video should help you build your own composite Zend_Form element. We’ll be building a phone element. The phone element will have 3 textboxes, one for geographic location, area code and local code. In the following videos will add a custom cell phone validator and some ajax validation.
Grab a copy of the project or browse the repository.
View the Screen cast: Writing Composite Zend_Form Elements
Having covered the preparation and character set options of performing a latin1 to utf8 MySQL migration, just how do you perform the migration correctly.
Complete story again at Migrating MySQL latin1 to utf8 – The process .
Mike Hillyer wrote a very good article on Managing Hierarchical data in MySQL, defenitely worth a read;
Most users at one time or another have dealt with hierarchical data in a SQL database and no doubt learned that the management of hierarchical data is not what a relational database is intended for. The tables of a relational database are not hierarchical (like XML), but are simply a flat list. Hierarchical data has a parent-child relationship that is not naturally represented in a relational database table.
For our purposes, hierarchical data is a collection of data where each item has a single parent and zero or more children (with the exception of the root item, which has no parent). Hierarchical data can be found in a variety of database applications, including forum and mailing list threads, business organization charts, content management categories, and product categories. For our purposes we will use the following product category hierarchy from an fictional electronics store:
Continuing on from preparation in our MySQL latin1 to utf8 migration let us first understand where MySQL uses character sets. MySQL defines the character set at 4 different levels for the structure of data.
Before undertaking such migration the first step is a lesson in understanding more about how latin1 and utf8 work and interact in MySQL. latin1 in a common and historical character set used in MySQL. utf8 first available in MySQL Version 4.1 is an encoding supporting multiple bytes and is the system default in MySQL 5.0
Nathan Garlington wrote a nice solution for Tab based forms; Yes, it is possible to display a form in a tabContainer. I do it all the time, including using other dijit containers as well. keep in mind that this is just my solution…there are probably other ways to do this. Feel free to customize it according to your needs. Also, you may notice that I don’t include an action attrib or method attrib declaration to the form node itself…this is because I handle form submitting via xhr. Example code below:
class My_Form extends Zend_Dojo_Form
{
public function init()
{
$this->setDisableLoadDefaultDecorators(true);
// setup the our default decorators
$this->setDecorators(array(
'FormElements',
array('TabContainer', array(
'id' => 'myTabContainer',
'style' => 'width: 950px; height: 420px;',
'dijitParams' => array('tabPosition' => 'top'),
)),
'DijitForm',
));
$this->setName('myAddTrailerForm');
$this->setElementDecorators(array(
array('DijitElement'),
array('Description'),
array('HtmlTag', array('tag' => 'dd')),
array('Label', array('tag' => 'dt')),
));
//call custom class methods to add form members
$this->_addElements()
->_addDisplayGroups();
}
private function _addElements()
{
$this->addElements(array(
// general information display group elements
new Zend_Dojo_Form_Element_FilteringSelect('field1', array(
'label' => 'First Field:',
'multiOptions' =>(array(
'option1' => 'option1',
'option2' => 'option2'
)),
'required' => true,
)),
new Zend_Dojo_Form_Element_CheckBox('cb1', array(
'label' => 'Are you sure?:',
)),
new Zend_Dojo_Form_Element_FilteringSelect('year', array(
'label' => 'Year:',
'multiOptions' => array(/*....*/),
'required' => true,
)),
new Zend_Dojo_Form_Element_ComboBox('comboBox1', array(
'label' => 'ComboBox1:',
'multiOptions' => array(/*....*/),
'required' => true,
'autocomplete' => false,
'attribs' => (array('propercase' => true, 'trim' =>true)),
)),
new Zend_Dojo_Form_Element_ValidationTextBox('validationBox1', array(
'label' => 'ValidationBox1:',
'required' => true,
'attribs' => array('uppercase' => true, 'trim' =>true),
)),
new Zend_Dojo_Form_Element_ValidationTextBox('validationBox2', array(
'label' => 'ValidationBox2:',
'required' => true,
'invalidMessage' => "Please enter a value",
'attribs' => array('maxlength' => 17, 'uppercase' => true, 'trim' =>true),
'filters' => array('StringToUpper'),
'validators' => array('Alnum'),
)),
)); // end $this->addElements
return $this;
} // end _addElements()
/**
* Create the tabbed container layout
*/
private function _addDisplayGroups()
{
// add the display groups
$this->addDisplayGroup(
array( // elements in the displayGroup
'field1',
'cb1'
),
'generalInformation' // displayGroupName
);
$this->generalInformation->setDecorators(array(
'FormElements',
array('HtmlTag', array('tag' => 'dl')),
array(
'ContentPane', array(
'title' => 'General Information'
)
)
));
$this->addDisplayGroup(
array(
'year',
'comboBox1',
),
'tab2'
);
$this->tab2->setDecorators(array(
'FormElements',
array('HtmlTag', array('tag' => 'dl'),
array(
'ContentPane', array(
'title' => 'Tab 2'
)
)
));
$this->addDisplayGroup(
array(
'validationBox1',
'validationBox2',
),
'tab2'
);
$this->tab2->setDecorators(array(
'FormElements',
array('HtmlTag', array('tag' => 'dl', 'class' => 'addTrailer')),
array(
'ContentPane', array(
'title' => 'Axles'
)
)
));
return $this;
} // end _addDisplayGroups();
public function buttonsSubForm()
{
$subForm = new Zend_Dojo_Form_SubForm();
$subForm->setDecorators(array(
'FormElements',
array('HtmlTag', array('tag' => 'div', 'id' => 'buttonsSubForm', 'class' => 'span-7 push-3 prepend-top')),
))
->setElementDecorators(array(
array('DijitElement'),
))
->addElements(array(
new Zend_Dojo_Form_Element_Button('submit', array(
'type' => 'button',
'label' => 'Submit it!',
'attribs' => array('disabled' => 'disabled'),
)),
new Zend_Dojo_Form_Element_Button('cancel', array(
'label' => 'Cancel',
)),
));
$subForm->submit->removeDecorator('DtDdWrapper');
$subForm->cancel->removeDecorator('DtDdWrapper');
return $subForm;
} // end buttonsSubForm();
} // end class
That’s it. There may be some errors in there, but the idea is there. As you can see, once you see you how it goes together, it’s actually trivial to add dijit layout containers to a zend form. Be sure that you are in fact extending Zend_Dojo_Form, or using one of the other methods shown in the docs for dojo-enabling your form. You may or may not like the buttons subForm I use here either…I do this because otherwise the submit buttons have to be in their own tab, and that makes it confusing for some of my users…they don’t know where the buttons are to submit the form. So I display them in a div that renders outside the tab container, disable the submit button, and using dojo’s methods, I enable the button on the onValidStateChange dojo event. Let me know if you have any questions!
regards,
Nathan Garlington
Jon Lebensold post yet another excellent screen cast;
This little video tutorial should set you up for building your own custom Zend_Form decorators in 15 minutes. I’ll show you how you can make the necessary class and have it easily added to your existing Zend_Form_Decorator configuration.
Grab a copy of the project or browse the repository.
David Flatley writes;
With Adobe’s latest incarnation of the Flex Framework and the Flash Builder integrated development environment (IDE), creating truly engaging front-end clients is now more streamlined. Some of the useful tools and features covered in this article are the Data/Services, Test Operation, and Network Monitor additions to Flash Builder. In this article, I explain how to set up a simple Representational State Transfer (REST) service using the Zend Framework 1.9 locally and connect to it in the Flex 4 application.
To get the most from this article, you should have a basic knowledge of the Zend Framework version 1.9. Development experience locally on your machine with Apache Server distributions like XAMPP, WAMP, or MAMP is helpful but not mandatory. You will need to deploy the server-side application on Apache running PHP. There is no database connectivity for this article.
Finally, you must have Flash Builder with PHP development tools installed or some flavor of the Eclipse IDE with the Flash Builder plug-in to complete the examples in this article.
Read the Full Story.
Mike Willbanks writes; Continuous integration is all the rage these days; you are unit testing your code are you not? During some consulting in January with the help of Sebastian Bergmann, from thePHP.cc, we setup continuous integration utilizing Atlassian Bamboo and received training on PHPUnit.
Using Atlassian Bamboo for continuous integration will take you a bit to setup, however, I have found it to be an invaluable tool when utilizing the Atlassian stack (JIRA, Confluence, Crucible, Bamboo and Crowd).
This posting assumes the following:
This posting will go over the following:
Read the rest over at Mike Willbanks blog.
David Caunt wrote up a useful article on command line scripting;
As PHP developers, it is convenient to be able to write command line scripts in PHP. In doing so, you will almost certainly want access to Zend Framework components and their configurations as if you are writing a normal MVC app, but without invoking the MVC stack and without loading unnecessary resources. I’ve seen solutions where actions are exposed as controller actions and called by wget – these are counter-intuitive, inefficient, and will suffer from max execution timeouts and other problems.
Lets start with our website’s public/index.php – the script which sets up and launches an application. It looks roughly like this:
full article here; Easy command line scripts with Zend Application.