sf2 input type date - disable native datepicker

Newer versions of the Google Chrome browser (and perhaps Firefox will follow) implement their own datepicker on input fields with type="date". This seems to be some new fancy HTML5 feature, but correct me if I'm wrong. If you are using jQuery datepicker throughout your whole project for example, you suddenly have two datepickers on that input field.

There is no possibility to turn off the native datepicker with additional attributes. You are left with three solutions to your problem:

1. Use modernizr to detect this feature and only enable jQuery datepickers, if not present:
2. Prevent standard event handling on this kind of input types: which I don't think is a good solution!
3. Render all form fields of type date with type="text" in symfony2. To enable this globally, register a global form theme in your config.yml as described in the Symfony2 documentation. My form theme consists of the following Twig code: This overwrites form_widget_simple and checks for the registered field type before setting it for the input field. If it finds 'date' it is overwritten with 'text'. Very nice and quick solution in my opinion, hope that helps you.

Sublime Text 2 - Snippet to create get/set methods

Sublime Text 2 is one of the most advanced editors out there, available for Windows, Mac and Linux. I'm using it on an every day basis to write my PHP applications.

Sublime Text is a sophisticated text editor for code, html and prose. You'll love the slick user interface and extraordinary features. (www.sublimetext.com)

Its snippet system allows you to create snippets that are triggered by a sequence of characters you can define, followed by tab key. The syntax is really easy. To create a snippet choose "Tools, New Snippet".

The snippet I'd like to show you today is a huge timesaver. I use it excessively in my form models in symfony2. After declaring a model variable as private or protected I need to create a get and set method for it. Copy paste and substitute the variable name was my choice until today. The following snippet allows you to use the following workflow:

1. type 'getset'
2. press the tab key
3. type your variable name
4. done.

The result:

Many to many search with doctrine2 and symfony2

My last post was about how to search for a many to one entity where I needed to check the values of two attributes by using "exists". I couldn't find any other "clean" ORM/DQL query to do this.

While experimenting with many to many relations I encountered how to easily retrieve all users that are associated with a certain work category. Many to many relations in doctrine create a relational table between two entities, which is no entity itself. You cannot use the table to create joins. I'd like to cite the doctrine2 orm reference:

"Why are many-to-many associations less common? Because frequently you want to associate additional attributes with an association, in which case you introduce an association class. Consequently, the direct many-to-many association disappears and is replaced by one-to-many/many-to-one associations between the 3 participating classes."

The association class is your third entity which you can use to create your search queries using JOINs for example.

In this case we have a pure many to many relationship. I built a form with an element of type entity which represents the work categories.

As this draws a multiselect control with the ID of the work categories as value on submitting the form, you have access to them in your search query. The key is to use "MEMBER OF" then:


Surprisingly for me, this creates a very similar query as I used for the one-to-many search query:

AND EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM users_workcategories u2_ INNER JOIN user_work_category u3_ ON u2_.workcategory_id = u3_.id WHERE u2_.user_id = u0_.id AND u3_.id = ?) AND EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM promoters_workcategories u2_ INNER JOIN user_work_category u3_ ON u2_.workcategory_id = u3_.id WHERE u2_.user_id = u0_.id AND u3_.id = ?)

Doctrine is aware of of the third relational table and uses it for JOINs to assemble the native SQL query that looks far more complicated than the DQL string. For people not familiar with advanced SQL queries, this is a live safer. On the other hand, SQL people surely need to be argued into this new approach.

Search form using symfony2 and doctrine2

This post is about creating a search form and using the doctrine2 query builder to dynamic built the query. You need an object you can bind the form values to. I used the symfony2 entity generator to build my heavy search form data holder really quickly. Let it create an empty repository class for you, which will hold the search function later. Use the symfony2 form generator to create a form based on the entity. As this entity won't be saved in the database the doctrine annotations are not needed. I kept them for later use and just removed the "Entity" annotation.

Next thing you do is writing a template for your form and to specify some validation rules. My controller action which receives the search POST looks like this:



We need to implement the findBySearchCriteria function in the empty repository class of the user entity. This function returns a query builder object which we can do everything we want with.

The following examples show what is possible with the doctrine2 query builder in the search function.

Many-to-one search

The user has a languages attribute which is of type Language. The entity Language has three attributes:

1. a language name (e.g. english, french, etc)
2. points that define how good the language is spoken by the user (10 very good, 1 very bad)
3. a back reference to the user

We want to find users that marked their english knowledge at least with 5 points and their french with at least 7 points. To accomplish this, we need to check, if the user has an language entry which fulfills the given criteria. We check, if such a language entry exists.

As "exists" in the query builder expects a dql subquery, we give it one.

"u" is the alias for the User class of the main query builder. The same method is used for the french language points.

The resulting DQL is:

SELECT u, l FROM Acme\UserBundle\Entity\User u WHERE (EXISTS( SELECT langE FROM AcmeUserBundle:Language langE WHERE langE.user = u AND langE.language = :langName AND langE.points BETWEEN 10 AND :points))

Nested AND / OR queries

Next requirement is that the zip code of the user entity has to lie in a given range of zip codes. The user who defines the search criteria is able to provide a list of zip code ranges. The format for a range is "xxxxx-xxxxx", so a zip code consists of five digits.

The zip code range search query needs to be built using OR. The user's zip code can lie in one range OR another. Native SQL could look like this:

WHERE (zipCode BETWEEN :zipCodeFrom1 AND :zipCodeTo1) OR (zipCode BETWEEN :zipCodeFrom2 AND :zipCodeTo2)

To combine this with the language query, the OR part has to be nested within an AND part:

WHERE ((zipCode BETWEEN :zipCodeFrom1 AND :zipCodeTo1) OR (zipCode BETWEEN :zipCodeFrom2 AND :zipCodeTo2)) AND (EXISTS( SELECT .... 

To accomplish the OR nesting you can use add() on the orx expression. The following example shows how to do that:


This results in a really nice nested query like this:

SELECT u FROM Acme\UserBundle\Entity\User u WHERE ((u.zipCode BETWEEN :zipFrom1 AND :zipTo1) OR (u.zipCode BETWEEN :zipFrom2 AND :zipTo2)) AND (EXISTS( SELECT langE FROM AcmeUserBundle:Language langE WHERE langE.user = u AND langE.language = :langName AND langE.points BETWEEN 10 AND :points))

Building nested queries is really easy. It took me some time to find out that I can use add() on the orx expression to dynamically add parts to it.

Notes on Zend SOAP webservice development

Developing SOAP webservices with the Zend Framework is very easy, but there are some things that aren't explicitly mentioned in the documentation. Hopefully this hints will help you to save time.

WSDL caching

While developing a webservice application do not forget to disable WSDL caching, e.g. in your php.ini configuration file.

soap.wsdl_cache_enabled=0

Set path to SOAP server in WSDL file

When you use a controller for your webservice and desire to have two actions, one for the automatically generated WSDL file and one for the server, use the setUri method of the Zend_Soap_AutoDiscover class to set the URI of the server.

$wsdl->setUri('http://example.localhost/index/soapserver');

Error handling

Error handling with exceptions is easy. I suggest to create your own Exception class first, it can be empty for now:

In your webservice class throw your new exception on invalid input for example.
On SOAP server side, you have to register your Exception class:


On Soap client side embed your request in a try - catch block:

Which for example outputs: 'SOAP ERROR: [Receiver] The product ID does not exist!'

The code

The webservice controller:


The webservice class:


The custom Exception class:

Google Chrome double request session problem

While working on an older PHP project based on a self made framework I noticed strange behaviour when running the project in Chrome. Everything worked fine in all other browsers, no matter, if it was production or development environment.

Each time I logged in the session ID cookie changed. The consequence was, that when trying to reload the page or open other restricted pages the system logged me out.

Even though everthing worked fine on other browsers, I tried to find the bug in the PHP code. I thought I missed something, set wrong headers which Chrome interpreted more strictly than other browsers or something similar. None of that was true. I debugged the code responsible for the session, made sure nothing is going to fall through the cracks. Code that was intended to run once on page execution ran twice, which lead me to the idea, that it's a forwarding/reloading issue.

I checked the $_SERVER array for header information, which differed between browsers. But there was nothing suspicious. REQUEST_URI then revealed the problem: While you would expect only one request to '/' Chrome requested '/favicon.ico' in a second request. This somehow caused a reload with a seperated cookie space, because the reloaded page couldn't read the session cookie and created a new one. I'm not sure what happened in detail but providing a favicon.ico file helped.

I'd like to emphasize that I didn't use a favicon in the HTML, perhaps there is a flag set in the server configuration which is ignored by other browsers.

Hope this helps someone, this took me some time to figure out.

Font problems with wkhtmltopdf

Recently I ran into problems with font kerning and font sizes when creating PDFs with wkhtmltopdf on different machines. I create PDFs on my ubuntu machine locally and on a FreeBSD server remotely.

Unfortunately font sizes differed a lot and from the beginning the kerning wasn't as I expected. The space after characters like 'v' is too small or too big, depending on the chosen font size. Sometimes it happens that two characters get rendered  one on the other. This is not acceptable.

I found out that this topic is already discussed in the wkhtml bugtracker. Users have different approaches to that problem, but none of the solutions is acceptable for me. Running an XServer is not possible and running xvfb as a wrapper to the tool sounds a lot slower than using wkhtmltopdf 'natively' and certainly is!

After experimenting with CSS modifications concerning font sizes, letter spacing, --zoom and --disable-smart-shrinking / --enable-smart-shrinking parameters to wkhtmltopdf I finally found a working solution. It's very easy to apply and has no disadvantages.

I need polish characters in my texts, so I downloaded high quality fonts from TeX Gyre Project. They provide their fonts in ODF format instead of the commonly used TTF format. I don't know, if the fonts of the Gyre Project solve the problem or if it is the newer ODF format that eliminates certain limitations of the TTF format when used on different operating systems.

In your external or internal stylesheet of your HTML file you'd like to convert, define a custom font face like this:


Don't forget to use the correct path to your font. Whenever you want to use it, use your new defined font family:


This eliminates all problems arising due to different font versions on different systems and the kerning bug in wkhtmltopdf version 0.10.0_beta5