Symfony Blog

A week of symfony #333 (13->19 May 2013)

Javier Eguiluz — Sun, 19 May 2013 13:56:00 +0200

This week, the new Symfony 2.3 branch was created. In addition, the first Symfony 2.3 release candidate version was published, which includes tons of great small improvements. Lastly, one of the biggest Symfony events of the year, the Symfony Live Portland 2013 conference, will take place next week.

Development mailing list

[HttpKernel] Multi base/root dir support or not?

Symfony2 development highlights

2.1 changelog:

91b8490: [DomCrawler] fixed Crawler::children() to not trigger a notice for childless node

2.3 changelog:

f41ac06: changed all version deps to accepts all upcoming Symfony versions
0617ed1: [Console] removed the descriptor from data set providers
ee0cc40: [Console] fixed NullOutput to not extend from abstract Output class
9dcc9fa: [Console] fixed abstract Output class that fasly claims to support guessing of decorated variable
6d5bc7a, 683bd17: [Twig] removed extra table colunm in the button_row block template
8f54da7: [BrowserKit] do not follow redirects if status code is not 30x

They talked about us

Be trained by Symfony experts - 2013-05-24 Portland - 2013-05-27 Paris - 2013-05-30 Paris

New in Symfony 2.3: Small things matter

Fabien Potencier — Fri, 17 May 2013 12:32:00 +0200

Every new Symfony release tries to brings some small but useful improvements. Let's dive into some of them for Symfony 2.3 (in no particular order).

In #6950, Emanuele Gaspari tweaked the output of the router:match command to display the route information if there is a match. That should help you understand why this specific route matched.

When a customer stumbles upon an exception when testing your shiny new Symfony application, you might want to get the stack trace to investigate the issue further. You can use the web profiler, but you can now also ask him to copy and paste the stack trace from the web page as there is now a plain text version of it thanks to the work of Igor Wiedler in #6613.

In #6815, Javier López added a default configuration for the Serializer component in the Service Container. Read the dedicated cookbook to learn how you can customize it.

Since 2.2, you can use the PHP built-in webserver on your development machine (but it was limited to the development environment). But what if you want to test your production error pages? Thanks to Dariusz Górecki did in #7507, you can now run the built-in server in any environment (php app/console --env=prod server:run).

When using a form to login your users, you might want to start the session as late as possible. Adrien Brault added a configuration setting (require_previous_session) to better control if a session must exist before submitting an authentication request (see #4776 and the setting in the docs).

Since 2.2, you need to manually enable support for the _method request parameter. Thanks to Toni Uebernickel in #7202, you can now control this feature with the http_method_override setting.

In #6550, Eric GELOEN made debugging configuration parameters a lot easier; use php app/console container:debug --parameters to list all parameters and php app/console container:debug --parameter=kernel.debug to display the value of a specific parameter. This can also be useful if you need a parameter value in a bash script ($CACHE_DIR="`php app/console container:debug --parameter=kernel.cache_dir`/foo").

Internally, Symfony converts short controller names (FooBundle:Home:index) to a controller/action pair that PHP understands. In #7843, Bart van den Burg, added a way to do the reverse: transform a controller::action string to its short name notation ($container->get('controller_name_converter')->build('Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Controller\RedirectController::redirectAction'); would return FrameworkBundle:Redirect:redirect).

If, like Henrik Bjørnskov, you have a retina display, #7065 brings retina canvas elements to the web profiler.

The Sensio Generator Bundle speeds up bootstrapping Doctrine entities, CRUD controllers, Form types, and more. But what if you want to customize the generated code? Thanks to the work of NinjDS, Luis Muñoz Hernández, and Fabien Potencier, you can now override each generated block quite easily. Reading the documentation should get you started in no time.

Romain Neutron has been very busy with the Process component and he contributed several enhancements: signals support and pid support in #5476, and proper timeout support in #7583. Ever wanted to run commands that need a TTY to run properly? Máximo Cuadros got you covered in #7566.

Sometimes, you need to mix a Symfony application with another PHP application within a single project. Sharing sessions is a nightmare, but Karma Dordrak, in #7571, added a way to manage a session started outside of Symfony (he even wrote a whole chapter in the documentation about it).

Ever wondered if using the PATCH HTTP method would work with a Symfony form? Bernhard Schussek made it possible in #7849.

This is Friday... Lucky you, Symfony 2.3.0 RC1 has just been released and the week-end is just around the corner. So, what about testing some of these new features?

Be trained by Symfony experts - 2013-05-24 Portland - 2013-05-27 Paris - 2013-05-30 Paris

Symfony 2.3.0 RC1 released

Fabien Potencier — Fri, 17 May 2013 10:34:00 +0200

The first release candidate for Symfony 2.3.0 is out. The most noticeable changes are the creation of the 2.3 branch and the switch from dev to RC in the Standard Edition composer.json file.

You can see the whole CHANGELOG online if you want to learn more about the few bugs that were fixed since beta2.

If everything goes fine, the final release should be out before the end of May, as planned in our release process.

Be trained by Symfony experts - 2013-05-24 Portland - 2013-05-27 Paris - 2013-05-30 Paris

A week of symfony #332 (6->12 May 2013)

Javier Eguiluz — Sun, 12 May 2013 17:20:00 +0200

This week, Symfony 2.3.0 released its second and last beta version. Among other features, this version supports the interactive management of the parameters.yml file and some nice improvements for the Console component. In addition, the Symfony 2.1.10 maintainance version and the Twig 1.13.0 version were released.

Symfony2 development highlights

2.1 changelog:

05b987f: [Process] cleanup tests & prevent assertion that kills randomly Travis-CI
37af771: [Console] added dedicated testcase for HelperSet class
e8d5d16, c93b9f7: [Config] fixed Loader import
a5441b2: [Yaml] fixed parsing of leading blank lines in folded scalars

2.2 changelog:

60edc58, e318759: [Serializer] fixed fatal error in normalize/denormalizeObject

Master changelog:

78e3710: added a ProxyManager Bridge
59867f9: made some optimization when parsing YAML files
0a26641: [DomCrawler] updated Crawler class (if HTML is not well-formed XML parsing goes wrong)
853f681: fixed request scope issues
dd0e138: eased translationNodeVisitor overriding in TranslationExtension
fdb4b1f: [Console] moved --help support to allow proper behavior with other passed options
bd0c48c: [Console] moved the IO configuration to its own method
be42dbc: [HttpFoundation] fixed guessClientExtension() method
97bee20: pass exceptions from the ExceptionListener to Monolog
3beaf52: [Security] disabled the BCryptPasswordEncoder tests for PHP versions lower than 5.3.7

They talked about us

Be trained by Symfony experts - 2013-05-24 Portland - 2013-05-27 Paris - 2013-05-30 Paris

Symfony 2.3.0 Beta 2 released

Fabien Potencier — Fri, 10 May 2013 19:25:00 +0200

A week after the release of the first Symfony 2.3 beta, here is the second and last one.

If you want to help us, please, test this version on your existing projects or play with it on a new one:

Create a new project via Composer:

$ php composer.phar create-project symfony/framework-standard-edition somewhere/ 2.3.0-BETA2

Download a ready-made project based on the Standard Edition TGZ or ZIP;
Download some components via Github downloads: https://github.com/symfony/{COMPONENT_NAME}/archive/v2.3.0-BETA2.zip.

Be trained by Symfony experts - 2013-05-24 Portland - 2013-05-27 Paris - 2013-05-30 Paris

New in Symfony 2.3: Great new Features in the Console Component

Fabien Potencier — Wed, 08 May 2013 15:59:00 +0200

Contributed by
Peter Kruithof
in #7300.

Progress helper enhancements¶

The console progress helper was added in 2.2. For 2.3, several enhancements were made to the display like avoiding too much flickering, or supporting UTF-8.

There is also one new feature, the possibility to set the current progress of the bar. That's interesting for instance when you are displaying the progress of a file download, where a callback provides the current download progress:

// advance the progress bar 1 unit
$progress->advance();

// set the progress bar manually
$progress->setCurrent(75);

Contributed by
Saša Stamenković
in #6368.

TableHelper¶

A lot of people were asking for a way to nicely display a table from the console. That's now possible in Symfony 2.3:

$table = $app->getHelperSet()->get('table');
$table
    ->setHeaders(array('ISBN', 'Title', 'Author'))
    ->setRows(array(
        array('99921-58-10-7', 'Divine Comedy', 'Dante Alighieri'),
        array('9971-5-0210-0', 'A Tale of Two Cities', 'Charles Dickens'),
        array('960-425-059-0', 'The Lord of the Rings', 'J. R. R. Tolkien'),
        array('80-902734-1-6', 'And Then There Were None', 'Agatha Christie'),
    ))
;
$table->render($output);

And here is how it would be displayed:

I won't detail all the possible options as there is a nice cookbook entry for this feature.

Contributed by
Jean-François Simon
in #6368.

Console output in more Formats¶

Did you know that you can get the help for any given command in the XML format? It has been possible since symfony 1, and it is heavily used by many IDEs as a mean to wrap the Symfony CLI tool in a nice GUI.

As of Symfony 2.3, this feature has been abstracted so that you can now get the output in the Markdown, JSON, and XML format:

$ php app/console help some:command --format=json

$ php app/console list --format=json

Contributed by
Florin Patan and
Jordi Boggiano
in #7841.

More Verbosity Levels¶

Some commands gives you a more verbose output when using the --verbose flag (or -v). You can also remove all the output of a command by using the --quiet flag (or -q).

As of 2.3, you now have access to three levels of verbosity:

$ php app/console foo --verbose=1 # equivalent to -v
$ php app/console foo --verbose=2 # equivalent to -vv
$ php app/console foo --verbose=3 # equivalent to -vvv

Composer already takes advantage of this feature. Upgrade to the latest version of Composer, and try using -v or -vv when running composer install; you will see that Composer outputs interesting information that can help you debug problems.

Be trained by Symfony experts - 2013-05-24 Portland - 2013-05-27 Paris - 2013-05-30 Paris

New in Symfony 2.3: Interactive Management of the parameters.yml File

Fabien Potencier — Tue, 07 May 2013 07:40:00 +0200

Contributed by
Christophe Coevoet
in #522.

One of the best practice when developing a Symfony application is to make it configurable via a parameters.yml file. It contains information such as the database name, the mailer hostname, and custom configuration parameters.

As those parameters can be different on your local machine, your testing environment, your production servers, and even between developers working on the same project, it is not recommended to store it in the project repository. Instead, the repository should contain a paramaters.yml.dist file with sensible defaults that can be used as a good starting point for everyone.

Then, whenever a developer starts working on the project, the parameters`.yml file must be created by using the parameters.yml.dist as a template. That works quite well, but whenever a new value is added to the template, you must remember to update the main parameter file accordingly.

As of Symfony 2.3, the Standard Edition comes with a new bundle that automates the tedious work. Whenever you run composer install, a script creates the parameters.yml file if it does not exist and allows you to customize all the values interactively. Moreover, if you use the --no-interaction flag, it will silently fallback to the default values.

Please remember that storing password or any other sensitive information in the parameters.yml file is not a good idea, and Symfony provides other ways to do the same in a more secure way.

Be trained by Symfony experts - 2013-05-24 Portland - 2013-05-27 Paris - 2013-05-30 Paris

Symfony 2.1.10 released

Fabien Potencier — Mon, 06 May 2013 19:52:00 +0200

I've just released Symfony 2.1.10. It fixes quite a few bugs. Here are some of the most interesting ones:

bcb5400: [Form] Fixed transform()/reverseTransform() to always throw TransformationFailedExceptions
2b554d7: [BrowserKit] remove validation related headers when needed
2a531d7: Fix getPort() returning 80 instead of 443 when X-FORWARDED-PROTO is set to https
c2bc707: fixed detection of secure cookies received over https
54bcf5c: [Translator] added additional conversion for encodings other than utf-8
da156d3: fix overwriting of request's locale if attribute _locale is missing
047212a: [Yaml] fixed handling an empty value
94a9cdc: [Routing][XML Loader] Add a possibility to set a default value to null
9fcd2f6: [HttpFoundation] fixed the creation of sub-requests under some circumstances for IIS
bec8ff1: Fix timeout in Process::stop method
3780fdb: Fix Process timeout
64a1d39: Fixed long multibyte parameter logging in DbalLogger:startQuery

Be trained by Symfony experts - 2013-05-24 Portland - 2013-05-27 Paris - 2013-05-30 Paris

New in Symfony 2.3: Buttons support in Forms

Fabien Potencier — Mon, 06 May 2013 10:25:00 +0200

Contributed by
Bernhard Schussek
in #6528.

The first time I read about this feature, I was sceptical at best. Why would you want to manage buttons in your forms as buttons are only a display thing? I was wrong and once more, Bernhard did a great job implementing this new feature.

As of Symfony 2.3, you can add buttons to your forms, like any other fields:

$form = $this->createFormBuilder($task)
    ->add('name', 'text')
    ->add('save', 'submit')
    ->getForm();

When rendering the form with the canonical {{ form_widget(form) }} instruction, the button will be rendered as well. But that alone would not be very interesting. So, what is it really about?

Submit buttons in forms are not really useful except for when there are more than one; the logic that processes the form will probably be different depending on the button that was clicked by the user:

$form = $this->createFormBuilder($task)
    ->add('name', 'text')
    ->add('save', 'submit')
    ->add('save_and_add', 'submit')
    ->getForm();

And that's a situation where managing buttons in the form framework starts to make sense. From your controller, you can now check which button was clicked with the new isClicked() method and act accordingly:

if ($form->isValid()) {
    // ... do something

    // the save_and_add button was clicked
    if ($form->get('save_and_add')->isClicked()) {
        // probably redirect to the add page again
    }

    // redirect to the show page for the just submitted item
}

But there is more than that: the validation group can be different for each button. That comes in handy when working with wizard forms:

$form = $this->createFormBuilder($task)
    // ...
    ->add('nextStep', 'submit')
    ->add('previousStep', 'submit', array(
        // disable validation
        'validation_groups' => false,
    ))
    ->getForm();

Of course, this feature is entirely optional and for forms with only one submit button, you can keep the current way of doing things.

This new feature is fully documented in the official documentation; but having a look at the documentation pull request might be more convenient.

Be trained by Symfony experts - 2013-05-24 Portland - 2013-05-27 Paris - 2013-05-30 Paris

A week of symfony #331 (29 April -> 5 May 2013)

Javier Eguiluz — Sun, 05 May 2013 13:56:00 +0200

This week, the first beta of Symfony 2.3.0 was released. The most relevant additions were the new comparison validators, the requirement of the debug component to maintain BC, and the possibility to log fatal errors in production. In addition, Silex, the Symfony micro-framework, released its long-awaited 1.0.0 version.

Symfony2 development highlights

2.1 changelog:

8757ad4: [Process] termsig must be used instead of stopsig in exceptions when a process is signaled
10dea94: [Filesystem] fixed copy() is not working when open_basedir is set
25b8b84: [BrowserKit] fixed a recent BC break related to empty cookie domains
2a531d7: [HttpFoundation] fixed getPort() returning 80 instead of 443 when X-FORWARDED-PROTO is set to https
2b554d7: removed validation related headers when needed
cfebe47: [DependencyInjection] fixed wrong method in findTaggedServiceIds()
7b2ebbf: [Form] fixed String validation groups are never interpreted as callbacks
bcb5400: [Form] fixed transform()/reverseTransform() to always throw TransformationFailedExceptions

2.2 changelog:

609df32: [Swiftmailer] bumped allowed versions
dcced01: [Form] improved multi-byte handling of NumberToLocalizedStringTransformer
59b78c7: [Validator] fixed $traverse and $deep is passed to the visitor from Validator::validate()

Master changelog:

0bffdff: [Validator] added comparison validators (EqualTo, NotEqualTo, LessThan, LessThanOrEqualTo, GreaterThan, GreaterThanOrEqualTo, IdenticalTo, NotIdenticalTo)
7c729f5: [PropertyAccess] added negative path replaces and optional string arguments for PropertyPathBuilder
441222e: [Form] *_SET_DATA events are now guaranteed to be fired after the initial children were added
258ca07: [HttpKernel] moved symfony/debug to be a requirement (to maintain BC as the code was part of HttpKernel before)
7671e5c, 4dcee0a: implemented the logging of fatal errors in production
f44db48: [DependencyInjection] added suggestion on ParameterNotFoundException
729db0f: [DependencyInjection] added suggestion on ServiceNotFoundException
e989d8b: [DependencyInjection] added some check before guessing similar parameters
9cca065: [FrameworkBundle] placed initialization of $bundlesDir out of foreach loop
90a7e86: [Validator] added missing translation for new validators
549a308: [Form] fixed CSRF error messages to be translated and added csrf_message option
90a20d7: [Translation] made translation domain defaults in Translator consistent with TranslatorInterface
82ff360: [Form] removed deprecated exceptions

They talked about us

Be trained by Symfony experts - 2013-05-24 Portland - 2013-05-27 Paris - 2013-05-30 Paris