Invalidating old cache content on dynamic data in Symfony

Oct 11, 2010 Jacob Mather Open Source, Programming, Symfony, Tutorials 1 Comment management, programming, symfony

Here’s just a quick note for those of you working with caching solutions for dynamic data in Symfony.

Update: If testability is a concern, please read the follow up to this article.

One of the challenges with caching is deciding where the limit is. What’s worth caching, and what isn’t. Because cleaning up that old data is hard… isn’t it?

Not so much!

You just need to make a helper and a checks, and you’ll be expertly picking out the templates to invalidate!

The first hurdle with clearing out invalid data, is that usually your backend is separate from the frontend, so it’s a non-trivial reach to try and invalidate cache files of other applications. Or is it?

<?php
 
class cacheAssistant
{
  public static function clearCachePattern($pattern)
  {
    $envs = array('prod', 'dev');
    $apps = array('backend', 'frontend');
    foreach($envs as $env)
    {
      foreach($apps as $app)
      {
        $app_cache_dir = sfConfig::get('sf_cache_dir').DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.$app. DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.$env.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'template';
 	$cache_vars = array(
          'cache_dir' => $app_cache_dir,
   	  'cache_key_use_vary_headers' => true,
          'cache_key_use_host_name' => true,
        );
        $cache = new sfFileCache($cache_vars);
        $cache->removePattern($pattern);
      }
    }
  }
}

Your $cache_vars will differ depending on your cache settings, but essentially, that’s your main helper setup.

Now here’s what I use in my objects for cache clear detection:

<?php
 
class MyObject extends Doctrine_Record
{
  private $pendingClearCacheEntries = false;
  public function preSave($event)
  {
    if ($this->isModified())
      $this->pendingClearCacheEntries = true;
  }
  public function postSave($event)
  {
    if ($this->pendingClearCacheEntries)
    {
      $this->clearCacheEntries();
      $this->pendingClearCacheEntries = false;
    }
  }
  public function clearCacheEntries()
  {
    cacheAssistant::clearCachePattern('**/**/pages/index');
  }
}

Of course, your patterns will change depending on your cache options (I.e. I use the **/** because I have enabled cache_key_use_host_name, other settings may not accept this pattern.)

Happy caching, and if you have any questions, feel free to let me know!

How to customize sfGuardUser in sfDocrineGuard

Oct 9, 2010 Jacob Mather Design, Open Source, Programming, Tutorials 10 Comments forms, sfDoctrineGuard, symfony

One of the questions I see quite frequently is “How do I customize the user management interface for sfDoctrineGuard?” There are many different ways to go about it, but let me tell you about mine.

If you know me, you know I’m about attention to detail. I want the absolute cleanest solution you can come up with, and then I want it to look polished. So what you’re about to see will be quite a bit more involved than you would normally expect for such a tutorial, but I believe you will agree, at the end, that it was well worth the trip.

The first step is to get ready to customize. It’s easy, I promise. Here we go!

mkdir apps/backend/modules/sfGuardUser
mkdir apps/backend/modules/sfGuardUser/config
cp plugins/sfDoctrineGuardPlugin/modules/sfGuardUser/config/* apps/backend/modules/sfGuardUser/config/

That’s all you need to do, to begin customization!

Ok, so we’re all set up to change our page… so what do we want to do?

To make it easier to follow along, we’ll set our goal as the following: Add a ‘Name’ field to the user form.

This will take a few steps:

Create our sfGuardUserProfile table and object.
Add a great piece of useful code to BaseFormDoctrine.class.php that lets us make this look awesome.
Create a custom form that includes our new relationship in the mix.
Modify the generator.yml we copied over to:
1. Use that form
2. Add the new field to the top of the form.
3. One last little tweak.

That being said… let’s get started!

1. We add our new object and relation. Open your config/doctrine/schema.yml file and add the following:

sfGuardUserProfile:
  tableName: sf_guard_user_profiles
  columns:
    user_id: { type: integer(4), primary: true }
    name: { type: varchar(255) }
  relations:
    User:
      local: user_id
      class: sfGuardUser
      type: one
      foreignType: one
      foreignAlias: Profile
      onDelete: CASCADE

Note: pay special attention to integer(4). If you forget this, MySQL (and I assume other databases) won’t be able to build the relation properly as the field types will not match.

Now we need to rebuild things. If you don’t know how to do a migration, here’s the code you want:

./symfony doctrine:generate-migrations-diff
./symfony doctrine:migrate
./symfony doctrine:build --all-classes

Your sfDoctrineGuardUserProfile is ready to go, so let’s build our new admin form.

2. Add embedMergeForm to BaseFormDoctrine

The embedMergeForm function originates from (I believe) Roland Tapken of Cybso in this post. It’s a great piece of code. It gives us the function of embedded forms, with the look of merged forms. Here is the code I do (also adapted with one of the fixes from the comments section):

<?php
// File: lib/form/doctrine/BaseFormDoctrine
 
/**
 * Project form base class.
 *
 * @package    dcms
 * @subpackage form
 * @author     Jacob Mather
 * @version    SVN: $Id: sfDoctrineFormBaseTemplate.php 23810 2009-11-12 11:07:44Z Kris.Wallsmith $
 */
abstract class BaseFormDoctrine extends sfFormDoctrine
{
  /**
   * Embeds a form like "mergeForm" does, but will still
   * save the input data.
   */
  public function embedMergeForm($name, sfForm $form)
  {
    // This starts like sfForm::embedForm
    $name = (string) $name;
    if (true === $this->isBound() || true === $form->isBound())
    {
      throw new LogicException('A bound form cannot be merged');
    }
    $this->embeddedForms[$name] = $form;
 
    $form = clone $form;
    unset($form[self::$CSRFFieldName]);
 
    // But now, copy each widget instead of the while form into the current
    // form. Each widget ist named "formname|fieldname".
    foreach ($form->getWidgetSchema()->getFields() as $field => $widget)
    {
      $widgetName = "$name-$field";
      if (isset($this->widgetSchema[$widgetName]))
      {
        throw new LogicException("The forms cannot be merged. A field name '$widgetName' already exists.");
      }
 
      $this->widgetSchema[$widgetName] = $widget;                           // Copy widget
      $this->validatorSchema[$widgetName] = $form->validatorSchema[$field]; // Copy schema
      $this->setDefault($widgetName, $form->getDefault($field));            // Copy default value
 
      if (!$widget->getLabel())
      {
        // Re-create label if not set (otherwise it would be named 'ucfirst($widgetName)')
        $label = $form->getWidgetSchema()->getFormFormatter()->generateLabelName($field);
        $this->getWidgetSchema()->setLabel($widgetName, $label);
      }
    }
 
    // And this is like in sfForm::embedForm
    $this->resetFormFields();
  }
 
  /**
   * Override sfFormDoctrine to prepare the
   * values: FORMNAME|FIELDNAME has to be transformed
   * to FORMNAME[FIELDNAME]
   */
  public function updateObject($values = null)
  {
    if (is_null($values))
    {
      $values = $this->values;
      foreach ($this->embeddedForms AS $name => $form)
      {
        foreach ($form AS $field => $f)
        {
          if (isset($values["$name-$field"]))
          {
            // Re-rename the form field and remove
            // the original field
            $values[$name][$field] = $values["$name-$field"];
            unset($values["$name-$field"]);
          }
        }
      }
    }
 
    // Give the request to the original method
    parent::updateObject($values);
  }
}

Save your file, and let’s move on to step three.

3. Build our new interface form.

Let’s make a new file, lib/form/doctrine/myGuardUserAdminForm.class.php, and fill it with the following:

<?php
 
class myGuardUserAdminForm extends BasesfGuardUserAdminForm
{
  public function configure()
  {
    $uprof = new sfGuardUserProfileForm($this->object->Profile);
    unset($uprof['user_id']);
    $this->embedMergeForm('Profile', $uprof);
  }
}

Ok! Hard stuff done! Last little bits now!

4. Modifying the generator.yml to use our new form, and expose our new field.

All you have to do now is update the form section of the generator.yml to look like the following:

      form:
        class: myGuardUserAdminForm
        display:
          "NONE":                   [Profile-name, username, password, password_again]

Now all you have to do is clear your cache, and go to your sfGuardUser form page, and you will see your new field!

5. Cleaning up messes.

Remember back in the schema.yml where we specified the onDelete: CASCADE? Bad news, that probably didn’t take care of it. There’s a bug somewhere between Symfony and Doctrine where sometimes foreign key constraints aren’t always handled appropriately. To counteract that, we will just run an SQL command to correctly establish the relationship so that when users are removed, we also remove their auxiliary profile data.

Here’s your magic:

ALTER TABLE sf_doctrine_guard_user_profiles ADD CONSTRAINT sf_doctrine_guard_user_profiles_user_id_sf_guard_user_id  FOREIGN KEY (user_id) REFERENCES sf_guard_user(id) ON DELETE CASCADE;

And we’re done! See? It was quite a long trip, but I hope you agree with me, the result is worth it.

02/16/2011 – Note: A thanks to hectorh30 from #symfony for pointing out an error in step three regarding the name of the profile form. It has been corrected.

02/12/2011 – Note: And in step one about paths. Thanks hectorh30!

03/03/2011 – Note: Thanks to dmclark for pointing out myDoctrineGuardAdminForm should be myGuardUserAdminForm

03/28/2011 – Note: Thanks to Richard Linkster for pointing out a copy command that was all busted up.

Selecting a media player for your project

Oct 4, 2010 Jacob Mather Design, Open Source, Programming 2 Comments audio, flash, media player, user experience, video

There are a number of options to consider when selecting a media player for a project. Recently, I had a large media panel to build and which player to use was likely the most important piece of the puzzle.

Here are the factors I used in determining which media player to use:

Speed – How fast did it load?
Interface – How easy was it to use?
API – How easy will it be for me to work with?
Documentation – How easy will it be for me to figure out how to work with it?

There are three players I considered primarily. There are many others I looked at, but these three were a clear cut above the rest.

Here’s the break-down of them, and we’ll start with the least compatible for the tasks I was trying to accomplish.

MediaElement.js

In a world moving rapidly towards trying to accomplish 100% cross-platform content compatibility, especially with the recent proliferation of HTML5, new tools are a constant need. MediaElement.js is a giant step forward in this area. It takes the hodgepodge of various presentations throughout the browsers, and consolidates them into one consistent presentation.

The good:

Very slick presentation. Allowing the control panel to be completely within the HTML/CSS means you can make any sort of change you need. As I’m planning to add at least one button later, that was a definite bonus.
Consistent presentation across platforms.
Allows us to use the HTML5 <video> and <audio> tags, to let the latest browsers handle the video natively and then allow us to fall back to other players for less capable browsers.
It supports both a fallback Flash and Silverlight player, for maximum ability to ensure video is displayed.

The bad:

It was quite slow in my testing. The lag time between when an embedded <video> tag was detected and the video was ready to play, was extremely noticeable. It’s likely also due to loading up and then realize it needs to load a Flash or Silverlight player.
It didn’t handle dynamic changes very well. I think this could be solved by integrating it as a jQuery UI Widget as opposed to essentially just a basic wrapper routine.

Flowplayer

What initially impressed me with Flowplayer was the promise it showed for extending the base display with html overlays to help add contextual information to the video. Then I started looking over the site, and noticed that the documentation is absolutely top notch. These guys aren’t playing around. Very impressive.

The good:

The documentation. Oh my … word.
The API. Not only is it very accessible and well thought out, it’s throughly documented.
Playlists. It’s something I missed when playing with MediaElement.js.
Have I mentioned that Flowplayer is well documented.

The bad:

It’s huge. At roughly two times the size of JW Player, Flowplayer is the heavyweight of the bunch, which slows down that all important first page-load impression.
There’s some weirdness in it’s playlist system. When you push in a new playlist, the “cover image” isn’t loaded until you run play, which adds more delay between when the user initiates an action and when the player is where I will call “ready”.

JW Player

JW Player is now on version 5.2. I first used it somewhere back in version 3, and as a disclosure, own an unlimited license for both versions 3 and 4. I have been consistently impressed by the flexibility of the player, and it’s ability to handle whatever I throw at it… once you figure out how to tell it what it wants to know.

The good:

Flexibility is the name of the game.
It did everything I wanted it to, in a way that I could live with.
It was lightweight and the quickest to go from page load to presentation.

The bad:

The documentation could use some work. Instead of having answers at my finger tips, I had to search for them. Even for pretty basic things.
Some more descriptive errors might be nice, as opposed to things simply not working.

In the end, JW Player worked best for my purposes on this project, but every project is different, and I hope this helps some of you save some time.

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It's Majax

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." – Arthur C. Clarke

Invalidating old cache content on dynamic data in Symfony

How to customize sfGuardUser in sfDocrineGuard

Selecting a media player for your project

MediaElement.js

Flowplayer

JW Player