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.
I like to reuse code as much as possible and if there’s underyling data in something I’ll use again, I’ll put that data in some extractable form in an EAV (Entity, Attribute, Value) database table so I don’t need to maintain the data anywhere except one place.
So in the example below where the variable $jsonText is being assigned, I actually have a method called getFormChoices(‘states’) that pulls this $jsonText automatically, from anywhere. In Symfony, the getFormChoices() is a method I use in a base repository class that all other repositories extend and therefore inherit automatically. This is efficient since certain higher-level global functions are all accessible and maintained in a single “Base Repository” class.
<?php
$jsonText='{"AL" : "Alabama", "AK" : "Alaska", "AZ" : "Arizona", "AR" : "Arkansas", "CA" : "California", "CO" : "Colorado", "CT" : "Connecticut", "DE" : "Delaware", "FL" : "Florida", "GA" : "Georgia", "HI" : "Hawaii", "ID" : "Idaho", "IL" : "Illinois", "IN" : "Indiana", "IA" : "Iowa", "KS" : "Kansas", "KY" : "Kentucky", "LA" : "Louisiana", "ME" : "Maine", "MD" : "Maryland", "MA" : "Massachusetts", "MI" : "Michigan", "MN" : "Minnesota", "MS" : "Mississippi", "MO" : "Missouri", "MT" : "Montana", "NE" : "Nebraska", "NV" : "Nevada", "NH" : "New Hampshire", "NJ" : "New Jersey", "NM" : "New Mexico", "NY" : "New York", "NC" : "North Carolina", "ND" : "North Dakota", "OH" : "Ohio", "OK" : "Oklahoma", "OR" : "Oregon", "PA" : "Pennsylvania", "RI" : "Rhode Island", "SC" : "South Carolina", "SD" : "South Dakota", "TN" : "Tennessee", "TX" : "Texas", "UT" : "Utah", "VT" : "Vermont", "VA" : "Virginia", "WA" : "Washington", "WV" : "West Virginia", "WI" : "Wisconsin", "WY" : "Wyoming"}';
$jsonArr=json_decode($jsonText,true);
echo $jsonArr['VT']."<br/>"; // will return "Vermont"
// Build an HTML form SELECT pulldown with state acronyms as keys and the state names spelled out as display values:
$out="<select name='states'>";
foreach($jsonArr as $key=>$val){
$out.="<option value='$key'>$val</option>";
}
$out.="</select>";
echo "Select your state: $out";Please feel free to use parts or all of this script below in your own PHP projects. Some old school developers might remember 1999 hard-coding every state as an HTML SELECT option — yet, there are still web developers out there that spend time remaking these over and over. Your company pays for this inefficiency in a big way — projects don’t get completed as fast as they could or should, for one. Do you suspect your web department is complacent and inefficient? Ask them what they are doing to be efficient and reduce code maintenance later. If your web developers don’t have a clear answer, chances are they haven’t adapted in 5 years and your systems and code will reflect this apathy.
All you have to do is know where VirtualBox is installed, change the path to it below, then also change the name of the virtual machine (VM) you want to autostart below. Here, upon boot up, I have one of my local development servers auto start “vm1”, which is a Ubuntu web server with a few Symfony projects.
cd "C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox" vboxmanage startvm "vm1"
Fast, easy and reliable so if your server restarts, you don’t have to worry about your server staying offline.
The JQuery UI library’s Datepicker function is very convenient. Here’s a way to override the date field if you want to allow the user to also input the time of day along with it without adding an extra field and deal with merging the values in the backend. You can also add “+d.getSeconds()” if you want to allow seconds, but I find that’s wasted space.
$('.datepicker').datepicker({
dateFormat: 'yy-dd-mm',
onSelect: function(datetext){
var d = new Date(); // current time
datetext=datetext+" "+d.getHours()+":"+d.getMinutes();
$('.datepicker').val(datetext);
},
});
Recently, my computer started slowing down. I heard nightmares about hackers encrypting data on drives and only unlocking the drives if you pay a ransom. How nice.
Then, after Ctrl+Alt+Del and checking on programs running, I’ve started to see “Bitlocker Drive Encryption Service”. Sounds scary. Apparently, it’s part of Microsoft Windows. How many times have you seen a program running in Windows and wondered if your virus protection didn’t catch something. Are your keystrokes currently being listened to?! These days, you can’t be too careful. Or paranoid.
Thankfully, there is some information about Bitlocker here. Microsoft does provide documentation as well, learn more about Bitlocker by clicking here.