Strangebuzz...?

Hi Symfonians !

I am actually spending a lot of time on testing Symfony2. When building an application, one of the first thing you will have to do is to insert initial datas, also called fixtures, so you can use and test your application. There is a documentation on the Symfony website about this subject, it uses the DoctrineFixturesBundle.

It works very well, but I wanted to use YAML files "a la symfony1". So I ended up with this simple solution:

The base Loader class:

First, I create a base Loader class that others entities loaders will extend:

The getModelFixtures() function will load the YAML file corresponding to the current entity, the getModelFile() function will have to be implemented by sub-loaders. The class implements the ContainerAwareInterface so we can access the DIC in the loaders.

The Category loader:

The YAML file:

Both jobs and categories YAML files are almost equal to the Jobeet1 tutorial ones.

The loader class:

The getModelFixtures() function retrieves the fixtures for the Category entity and then you just have to iterate over the array. At each iteration we add a reference to the entity so it can be used in other loaders. (as a foreign key)

The Job loader:

The YAML file:

The loader class:

Same here, but:

• For each iteration we retrieve the proper category reference we already built in the Category loader (line 30).
• In Jobeet1 there was a loop directly in the YAML file in order to add lot of job rows, now we can do this loop in our loader: duplicateLastJob().
• There is also a special case where we force a value for the expiresAt date field that would be overridden by the Job object life-cycle callbacks otherwise.

I think this a good approach as you have the ease of writing YAML without loosing the possibility to handle complex or edge cases with PHP. You can find the code on github.

See you ! COil

PS: This tutorial was tested with Symfony Standard Edition 2.0.9.
PS2: If you have a blog post about fixtures, let me know so I can add it below.

Other posts about fixtures:

• http://www.dobervich.com/2011/03/15... (EN)
• http://dotheweb.posterous.com/using... (EN)
• http://www.informathic.com/post/201... (FR)
• http://tcuvelier.developpez.com/tut... (FR)
• http://keiruaprod.fr/symblog-fr/doc... (FR)
• http://iabsis.com/FR/article/21-5/C... (FR)

Post original: A week of symfony #263 (9->15 January 2012)

Cette semaine la branche master de Symfony2 s'est vue commité un important changement concernant la sécurité, celui-ci n'étant pas rétrocompatible: moved user comparison logic out of UserInterface. De plus, les gagnants des "Symfony Community Awards" ont été annoncés !

Hi symfonians !

If you are used to symfony1, you probably noticed that you don't have a myUser class to handle the user session. It's generally useful so you don't have to handle directly with session attributes and you can also have shortcuts. Well it's quiet easy to have such a class in Symfony2:
Declare your own session class as the framework level in your app/config.yml config file:

And now create your own mySession class which extends the default Symfony2 session class:

And your done.

PS: The class can be stored in another location, I'm not sure which is the best ?
PS2: The service could also be loaded at the Bundle level.

Post original: A week of symfony #260 (19->25 December 2011)

Cette semaine, la branche master de Symfony2 s'est concentré sur une importante refactorisation du DoctrineBridge. De plus, un nouveau composant a été créé pour la classe Filesystem. Enfin, la branche 2.0 a été rendue compatible avec la future version 1.5 de Twig.

Si vous suivez assidument l'actualité symfony, vous ne pouvez pas rater le post "A week of symfony" de notre ami Javier Equiluz. Il nous concocte donc toute les semaines un condensé du microcosme #symfony. Déjà 258 éditions ! Ça en fait du boulot, encore merci à toi Javier. (Muchas gracias Javier por tu trabajo !). Comme il n'y a pas de raison que ce soit toujours les mêmes qui trinquent, je me suis proposé pour faire la version française de ces articles. Ça ne peut pas faire de mal... trêve de blablas.