user experience

How to add jQuery to your Symfony project, part 1.

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The simplest way, hands down, is to simply include the sfJqueryReloadedPlugin in your project. This also enables you to include the sfAdminDashPlugin which makes for easy navigation and a nice login screen for your back-end systems.

However, the problem with jQuery Reloaded, is that it is both old, and for our purposes, incomplete.

Since the last update to jQuery Reloaded, jQuery has progressed to version 1.4.2 (from 1.3.2), and more importantly jQuery UI has upgraded to 1.8.2 (from 1.7.3) and added some very nice and easy pieces we can use in our quest to simplify some of the widgets users are commonly presented.

The other problem we will run into with jQuery Reloaded, is that it doesn't provide the CSS half of the jQuery UI library, meaning we would not be able to see any widgets we used properly.

So, with all this in mind, you now understand why in Part 2, I will be showing you how to roll your own jQuery plugin for Symfony.

Contextually relevant search results

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A while back, Kyle Baley of CodeBetter.com wrote an article named "The search interface, or "How to find people"" where he discussed the vast array of interesting questions that come up when considering how to make your search results as relevant and useful as possible.

When he mentioned that his database did not support LIKE, I offered another method within Kyle's comment board. However I had a bit more of detail I wanted to go into, but didn't have the time to expound then.

Basically, I think many of Kyle's ideas are spot on, however, the best result may be to simply code a number of queries in, and provide them as fall-back options. Here's an example in PHP, my preferred language, especially for examples:

$query = $_REQUEST['query'];
 
$max_results = 10;
 
$results = array();
 
$queries = array(
  "SELECT * FROM contacts WHERE last_name = '?'",
  "SELECT * FROM contacts WHERE LEFT(last_name, ".strlen($query).") = '?'",
  "SELECT * FROM contacts WHERE first_name = '?'",
  "SELECT * FROM contacts WHERE LEFT(first_name, ".strlen($query).") = '?'",
);
 
foreach($queries as $sql)
{
  $results = array_merge($results, fetch_all($sql, $query));
  if (count($results) > $max_results)
    break;
}

This way, you can return the ones you feel would be most relevant first, but then make sure you can provide for some of the edge cases as well.

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