Example of fetching rates:

    /* @var $shipment \SimpleUPS\Track\SmallPackage\Shipment */
    foreach (\SimpleUPS\UPS::trackByTrackingNumber('1Z4861WWE194914215') as $shipment) {

    }

It’s the most affordable library out there and comes with a 30 day money back guarantee. What have you got to lose? Try it out.

Note: There may be better way if you’re using SpringMVC.  In this example, I’m using Grizzly, Spring Framework, Hibernate, JPA, Jersey and Jackson.

Problem: It can’t be autowired

Jersey will instantiate the object it’s mapping the response to outside of Spring’s methods. In the below example, NewJobRequest can’t utilize @autowire, and @Component is ineffective.

@Path("/job")
public class JobResource  {
    @Path("/new")
    @POST
    public String New(NewJobRequest request) {
        return "done";
    }
}

public class NewJobRequest {

    @Autowired
    private VendorService vendorService;

    @JsonCreator
    public NewJobRequest(Map<String, Object> request) {
        setVendor(vendorService.findById(request.get("vendorId")); //vendorService is null
    }
    ....
}

Solution: Spring’s ApplicationContextAware

We need to create an ApplicationContextProvider and utilize that to manually load the service bean.

public class ApplicationContextProvider implements ApplicationContextAware {
    private static ApplicationContext applicationContext;

    public static ApplicationContext getApplicationContext() {
        return applicationContext;
    }

    public void setApplicationContext (ApplicationContext applicationContext) {
        this.applicationContext = applicationContext;
    }
}

public class NewJobRequest {

    private VendorService vendorService;

    public NewJobRequest() {
        vendorService = (VendorService) ApplicationContextProvider.getApplicationContext().getBean("vendorService");
    }

    @JsonCreator
    public NewJobRequest(Map<String, Object> request) {
        setVendor(vendorService.findById(request.get("vendorId")); //vendorService is null
    }
    ....
}

Of course this all relies on ensuring your bean is setup correctly…

@Configuration
public class Config {
    @Bean
    public VendorService vendorService() {
        return new VendorService();
    }

    @Bean
    public ApplicationContextProvider applicationContextProvider() {
        return new ApplicationContextProvider();
    }
}

Petri Kainulainen put together this tutorial, which was the best resource I was able to find. It promotes good configuration structure and practices. Here’s a link to the main config file and the github repo.

This is because I was including the com.mysql.management package which has a dependency on com.sun.jdmk.

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.mysql</groupId>
    <artifactId>management</artifactId>
    <version>1.1.6</version>
</dependency>

Turns out this is because with Sun’s licensing agreements Maven cannot store their jars in the repository even though they’re listed in the maven repository.

For my project, we actually weren’t using any functionality that required this package. So excluding it worked great:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.mysql</groupId>
    <artifactId>management</artifactId>
    <version>1.1.6</version>
    <exclusions>
        <exclusion>
            <groupId>com.sun.jmx</groupId>
            <artifactId>jmxri</artifactId>
        </exclusion>
        <exclusion>
            <groupId>com.sun.jdmk</groupId>
            <artifactId>jmxtools</artifactId>
        </exclusion>
    </exclusions>
</dependency>

If you do need this package, then you need to see the guide to install 3rd party jars in maven.

The Need

I needed child modules to be able to extend their parent module’s forms.  Namespacing the classes wasn’t a problem, but the results of namespacing were.

The Problem

Once the form was namespaced, Yii would generate IDs and Names that looked like \MyModule\Models\Forms\MyForm_first_name.  This is very problematic for a few reasons…

1. It breaks jQuery/CSS selectors because IDs cannot contain slashes
2. Your controllers, instead of looking for the POST variable MyForm, you’re looking for \MyModule\Models\Forms\MyForm_first_name

The Solution

1) Extend Yii’s CHtml::resolveName()

You need to overwrite CHtml::resolveName() so it doesn’t use a raw get_class().  We’ll use Mike’s solution over at the Yii forums on how to extend Yii classes in a namespaced environment: How to override Yii core classes.

Once we’ve done that, we still have a problem.  The CHtml class itself calls it’s own static methods with self::.  This is problematic because self will never look at called classes, but always looks at itself, even when extended (see example).  If you followed Mike’s setup on the Yii forums then you’ve already created your own copy of the Yii CHtml class.  The only solution here is to up the requirement of your application to PHP 5.3 and use late static bindings and change the self:: to static::.

I hate changing core classes, but I hate not using namespaces in my situation more.  It’s the lesser of 2 evils.  On the bright side, we only modified a copy of the core CHtml file.

Note: If you implement this, you need to make it VERY OBVIOUS why you modified a core class and what modifications were made.  In the event your Yii needs to be upgraded you want it to go as smoothly as possible.

My final solution ignores namespaces on forms. That means I can’t have \MyModule1\Models\Forms\MyForm and \MyModule2\Models\Forms\MyForm as part of the same multiform, but that’s not something I need. You can modify the CHtml::resolveName() however you’d like:

/**
 * WARNING - READ CAREFULLY
 * This is the CHtml class from Yii 1.1.12 and overwrites Yii's core CHtml class
 *
 *
 * This file is taken directly from the Yii directory/namespace for the purpose of extending it's functionality,
 * while still being referenced as CHtml throughout the application.
 *
 * Yes this is ugly, but we don't have another choice until this issue is fixed: https://github.com/yiisoft/yii/issues/129
 *
 * Read this post for details: http://www.yiiframework.com/forum/index.php/topic/28979-how-to-override-yii-core-classes/page__view__findpost__p__139447
 *
 *
 *
 *
 *
 *
 *
 *
 *
 *
 * -- To update the default Yii library below, follow these instructions to recreate the modifications
 *
 *  1) Replace all "self":: with "static"::
 *
 *
 *
 *
 *
 *
 *
 *
 *
 *
 *
 *
 *
 *
 *
 *
 *
 *
 *
 *
 *
 *
 */

/**
 * THE FIRST NAMESPACE WILL OVERWRITE YII'S DEFAULT FUNCTIONS
 */
namespace {
    class CHtml extends yiiCHtml
    {

        /**
         * Generates input name for a model attribute.
         * Note, the attribute name may be modified after calling this method if the name
         * contains square brackets (mainly used in tabular input) before the real attribute name.
         * @param CModel $model the data model
         * @param string $attribute the attribute
         * @return string the input name
         */
        public static function resolveName($model,&$attribute)
        {
            /* ----- Custom Change
                Added this class variable, instances of $class throughout this function
                used to be "get_class($model)"
             */
            $class = get_class($model);
            if (strstr($class, '\\')) {
                $pieces = explode('\\', $class);
                $class = end($pieces);
            }

            if(($pos=strpos($attribute,'['))!==false)
            {
                if($pos!==0)  // e.g. name[a][b]
                    return $class.'['.substr($attribute,0,$pos).']'.substr($attribute,$pos);
                if(($pos=strrpos($attribute,']'))!==false && $pos!==strlen($attribute)-1)  // e.g. [a][b]name
                {
                    $sub=substr($attribute,0,$pos+1);
                    $attribute=substr($attribute,$pos+1);
                    return $class.$sub.'['.$attribute.']';
                }
                if(preg_match('/](w+[.*)$/',$attribute,$matches))
                {
                    $name=$class.'['.str_replace(']','][',trim(strtr($attribute,array(']['=>']','['=>']')),']')).']';
                    $attribute=$matches[1];
                    return $name;
                }
            }
            return $class.'['.$attribute.']';
        }
    }
}

namespace yii {
    use Yii as Yii;

    /*
     * ----------------- Begin Yii's native CHtml class -----------------
     */

    /**
     * CHtml class file.
     *
     * @author Qiang Xue
     * @link http://www.yiiframework.com/
     * @copyright Copyright © 2008-2011 Yii Software LLC
     * @license http://www.yiiframework.com/license/
     */

    /**
     * CHtml is a static class that provides a collection of helper methods for creating HTML views.
     *
     * @author Qiang Xue
     * @version $Id$
     * @package system.web.helpers
     * @since 1.0
     */
    class CHtml
    {
        /* Yii's CHtml class*/

    }
}

2) Don’t let CActiveForm::validate() grab POST data automatically

Instead of

$form = new MyNamespaceMyForm();
if(Yii::app()->getRequest()->getIsAjaxRequest() && Yii::app()->getRequest()->getPost('ajax') === 'myform-form') {
    echo CActiveForm::validate($form); // will look for $_POST['MyNamespaceMyForm']
    return Yii::app()->end();
}

Pass POST data manually:

$form = new MyNamespaceMyForm();
$form->attributes = Yii::app()->getRequest()->getPost('MyForm'); //$_POST['MyForm']
if(Yii::app()->getRequest()->getIsAjaxRequest() && Yii::app()->getRequest()->getPost('ajax') === 'myform-form') {
    echo CActiveForm::validate($form, null, false); // "false" says to not look at $_POST, but look at $form->attributes
    return Yii::app()->end();
}

1. Ensure the URL being used by the plugin is passed to the dispatcher in web.xml. In this example we’re using *.json.

   <servlet>
       <servlet-name>dispatcher</servlet-name>
       <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
       <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
   </servlet>
   
   <servlet-mapping>
       <servlet-name>dispatcher</servlet-name>
       <url-pattern>*.html</url-pattern>
       <url-pattern>*.json</url-pattern>
   </servlet-mapping>

2. Since *.json is being forwarded to the dispatcher, now the dispatcher needs to tell Spring what URL to map the spellchecker controller to, and wrap it with the ServletWrappingController.

   <bean id="urlMapping" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.handler.SimpleUrlHandlerMapping">
       <property name="mappings">
           <props>
               <prop key="/spellchecker/google-spellchecker.json">googleSpellChekerWrappingController</prop>
           </props>
       </property>
   </bean>
   
   <bean id="googleSpellChekerWrappingController" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.ServletWrappingController">
       <property name="servletClass">
           <value>org.tinymce.spellchecker.GoogleSpellChekerServlet</value>
       </property>
   </bean>

if (request.getMethod() == "POST" && !search.isEmpty()) {

}

Netbeans doesn’t like this comparison.  It doesn’t like it because while it is my intention to compare the output value of getMethod() against “POST”, the “==” operator won’t do that. The “==” operator compares the actual objects to see if they both reference the same object.

String x = new String("foo");
String y = new String("foo");
String copyOfX = x;
System.out.println(x == y); // false
System.out.println(x.equals(y)); // true
System.out.println(x == copyOfX); // true

In the above example you’ll see that x == copyOfX returns true.  This is because both objects are in fact, the same object.  While the x and y string values are the same, they are not the same string object.

When comparing string values, always use .equals()

$filename = md5(file_get_contents($pathToFile));

I personally use and recommend MySQL Backup Pro to create backup databases.  There are a lot of great features…

• Backup individual or all databases in a separate file for each database
• UTF-8 support
• Daily, weekly and monthly backup rotation
• Send backups to email
• Upload backups to FTP
• Handles foreign keys and stored procedures

Once I have that setup and running, I have a simple PHP script to upload the backups to Amazon S3.  These backups can be restored through cPanel/PHPMyAdmin, or via command line.

// Take db backups and copy them to s3
// https://github.com/tpyo/amazon-s3-php-class
require_once 's3.php';

$bucket = 'my-bucket-name';
$backupPath = '/path/to/backups/archive/daily';

$s3 = new S3("[awsAccessKey]", "[awsSecretKey]");

$today = date('Y-m-d');
$expired = date('Y-m-d', strtotime('-5 days'));
foreach(glob($backupPath.'/'.$today.'/*.bz2') as $file) {
    $fileInfo = pathinfo($file);

    //move backup file to s3
    $s3->putObject(S3::inputFile($file), $bucket, $fileInfo['basename'], S3::ACL_PRIVATE);

    //remove expired files
    $s3->deleteObject($bucket, str_replace($today, $expired, $fileInfo['basename']));
}

The file type header is defined by the browser handling the uploading.  The fix for this appears to be to use mime_content_type on the file after it’s been uploaded instead of relying on $_FILES.

echo mime_content_type('php.gif') . "n"; //image/gif
echo mime_content_type('test.php'); //text/plain