Category: Articles

Main articles page for all things web tools and code. A free resource for the public containing information and tips.

Looking for a PHP developer, a Symfony expert or Wordpress web developer? Perhaps a business system architect that specializes in scalable MySQL business system design and deployment? We have reliable, fast and professional developers that meets your organization’s needs! Contact us for your next web development project and schedule a free consultation today.

Symfony & Twig: Simple month and year form selection widget

01/26/2016 Aaron Belchamber No Comments

This is a very useful Twig that I use in a lot of different forms.  I attach a listener and when they click “Update” it will redirect the user by appending the URL with the /year/month to hook nice and cleanly in built-in routes to pass the year and month into different controllers.

<form id="yearMonthWidget" name="newDate1" method="get" action="">

   <select name="month">
      {% for mo in 1..12 %}
         <option value="{{ mo }}">{{ ('2012-' ~mo~'-01')|date("M") }}</option>
      {% endfor %}

   </select>

   <select name="year">
      {% for yr in "now"|date("Y")+1..2010 %}
         <option value="{{ yr }}">{{ yr }}</option>
      {% endfor %}
   </select>
   <input type="submit" value="Update"/>
</form>

 


Symfony & Doctrine: Using table joins with unassociated entities

01/25/2016 Aaron Belchamber No Comments

In Symfony using Doctrine, if no association is available for two entities, you can still join them and treat them like they have a relationship.  To do so, you have to use the “Join: WITH” method.  Here’s an example query to illustrate, notice the “a.user = u.id”.

public function getHistory($users) {

    $qb = $this->entityManager->createQueryBuilder();
    $qb ->select('a', 'u')
        ->from('Credit\Entity\UserHistory', 'a')
        ->leftJoin(
            'User\Entity\User',
            'u',
            \Doctrine\ORM\Query\Expr\Join::WITH,
            'a.user = u.id'
        )
        ->where('u = :user')
        ->setParameter('user', $users)
        ->orderBy('a.created_at', 'DESC');

    return $qb->getQuery()->getResult();
}

Some other helpful links on Stack Overflow:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15087933/how-to-do-left-join-in-doctrine

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19185587/left-join-on-condition-and-other-condition-syntax-in-doctrine/19189240#19189240

Here’s a great reference for advanced Doctrine queries:

http://docs.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-orm/en/latest/reference/query-builder.html#high-level-api-methods


Adding Google Maps input widget to place location as simple as JQuery Datepicker

01/11/2016 Aaron Belchamber No Comments

Accessing the Google Map API for your own in-form location input widget which allowss users to “pin” their location on a Google map and allow you to store their map location, latitude and longitude in your database is easy with this library.  It’s just like the JQuery calendar widget — it’s as simple, clean and reliable!

Here’s a sample of how to use this code.

<fieldset class=”gllpLatlonPicker”>
<div class=”gllpMap”>Google Maps</div>
<br/>
<input type=”hidden” class=”gllpLatitude”/>
<input type=”hidden” class=”gllpLongitude”/>
<input type=”hidden” class=”gllpZoom”/>
<input type=”text” class=”gllpLocationName” size=42/>
</fieldset>

To learn more, check this powerful library out and check out the demo here!


Windows performance lagging? Have you tried the free Piriform CCleaner?

01/03/2016 Aaron Belchamber No Comments

It’s amazing how much bloat your Windows machine can accumulate, it’s worse than eating too much over the holidays!

I ran Piriform CCleaner on my machine and it freed up over 2 GBs of unnecessary files.  Lots of small files added up really taxes your system.  Also, the registry tools worked superbly in improving my bootup speeds.

Download the free version of Piroform today!


PHP Symfony Events: Developer tips to easily extend user administration and management within your code

11/30/2015 Aaron Belchamber No Comments

A special thanks to James Halsall for some excellent tips in tapping into Symfony events through kernel listeners.

His article explains how to create a service to trigger on certain events, this is related to the FOS User Bundle but the same pattern applies to most events in your Symfony project.  Click here to read the entire article with explanations and example code.