Tag Archives: Computing

MySQL Expressions in Zend Framework

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If you’re a Zend Framework developer, you’d know the built-in Zend_Db_Table methods insert(), update(), etc.

However the general approach there is like is said:

$data = array();
$data['key'] = $value;
$model = new ModelName();
$model->insert($data);
 
// that's very basic example, but in general this is 
// the way it works.

What happens if one of the column have to be an MySQL expression!? In example you’ve a date field and you’d like to insert something like the MySQL’s method NOW().

The solution is simply call a Zend_Db_Expr.

$data = array();
$data['key'] = $value;
$data['date'] = new Zend_Db_Expr('NOW()');
$model = new ModelName();
$model->insert($data);
 
// now the date column will be NOWed :)

Detecting POST Requests in Zend Framework

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Pure PHP

Pure phpiers are using used to something like detecting a submit in the _POST array.

if (isset($_POST['submit']) { ... }

Of course for this you’ve to be sure the HTML contains an submit type element with name attribute equal to “submit”.

The Zend Framework’s Way

Simply replace the line above with:

if ($this->getRequest()->isPost()) { ... }

This is way better than the first example. It detects the request method, not an array element!?

All the Site in … One Request

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Is it possible?

Yes it is! Actually I stumbled these days on a video where one of the guys talked about a quite interesting technique, that all the site was sent in one response from the server. But how is it possible? Actually everything is collected on the server side, i.e. with PHP which groups everything within a string. Obviously the images are base64ed. Than everything is send to the client with appropriate delimiters and mime types, and the client separates the string and build ups the page.

Problems

Of course there are some problems. First of all, as you may guess, MSIE doesn’t support base64. Another bad thing is that this isn’t cacheable.

One Good Use

There is however a good place to use this technique. In mobile versions. There is no much need of caches and most of all MSIE is not there!

Zend_Controller_Router_Route_Regex – the Power of Regular Expressions

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I posted once of custom URLs within Zend Framework, but back than I wasn’t quite sure enough there isn’t a better, more elegant way to do this job. Of course as it appears, there is! With no need to is to use the power of regular expressions with Zend_Controller_Router_Route_Regex. Thus you can match dynamically the URL.

Let’s assume you’d like to have a link with something like www.example.com/3939-some-title-here. This is really very common. So to proceed you’d have to have some regex like:

$pattern = '/\d+-.*/;

So what about Zend Framework

Here the things are going naturally more OOP.

$route = new Zend_Controller_Router_Route_Regex('(\d+)-?(.*)',
                       array('controller' => 'controller_name', 'action' => 'action_name'),
                       array(1 => 'id'));
 
$ctrl->addRoute('my-route', $route);

Iterate over YouTube Channel with Zend_Gdata_YouTube

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Read YouTube’s Feed in Zend App

The task is to read the entire Gdata from a YouTube’s channel. It may sound easy, but as you may know Gdata is based on the Atom publishing protocol, and it naturally gives you only the latest few items.

Of course Zend Framework has a large set of classes dealing with Google’s Gdata services, one of them is the Zend_Gdata_YouTube.

It gives you the power to iterate/paginate over the entire set of YouTube user’s/channel’s videos. In that example let’s assume you have a protected function doing the reading of a single portion:

protected function _process(Zend_Gdata_YouTube_VideoFeed $videoFeed)
{
 
    /* @var $entry Zend_Gdata_YouTube_VideoEntry */
    foreach ($videoFeed as $entry) {
        /* @var $published Zend_Gdata_App_Extension_Published */
        $published = $entry->getPublished();
        $thumbnails = $entry->getVideoThumbnails();
 
        // set date format
        $date = new Zend_Date($published->getText());
 
        // array
        $tags = $entry->getVideoTags();
 
        $data['title'] = $entry->getVideoTitle();
        $data['description'] = $entry->getVideoDescription();
        $data['date'] = $date->get('Y-MM-d hh:mm:ss');
        $data['thumb'] = @$thumbnails[3]['url'];
        $data['id'] = $entry->getVideoId();
        $data['flash_player'] = $entry->getFlashPlayerUrl();
        $data['tags'] = implode(',', $tags) . ', ' . $entry->getVideoCategory();
        // do whatever you want with the data
    }
 
}

The only thing left is to iterate over the “pages” of the feed. This can be done with getNextFeed() method.

public function readRssAction()
{
    $userId = 'some_user';
    $client = new Zend_Http_Client();
    $gdata = new Zend_Gdata_YouTube($client, 'my-app', null, $this->_apiKey);
    $videoFeed = $gdata->getUserUploads($userId);
 
    // save the last items
    $this->_process($videoFeed);
 
    try {
        while ($videoFeed = $videoFeed->getNextFeed()) {
            $this->_process($videoFeed);
        }
    } catch (Zend_Gdata_App_Exception $e) {
        echo $e->getMessage();
    }
}

You’ll get an exception when there is no more feeds to process!

To combine all this into a single controller and to complete the code here’s the entire source:

class YoutubeController extends Zend_Controller_Action
{
    protected $_apiKey = 'your_api_key_goes_here';
 
    protected function _process(Zend_Gdata_YouTube_VideoFeed $videoFeed)
    {
 
        /* @var $entry Zend_Gdata_YouTube_VideoEntry */
        foreach ($videoFeed as $entry) {
            /* @var $published Zend_Gdata_App_Extension_Published */
            $published = $entry->getPublished();
            $thumbnails = $entry->getVideoThumbnails();
 
            // set date format
            $date = new Zend_Date($published->getText());
 
            // array
            $tags = $entry->getVideoTags();
 
            $data['title'] = $entry->getVideoTitle();
            $data['description'] = $entry->getVideoDescription();
            $data['date'] = $date->get('Y-MM-d hh:mm:ss');
            $data['thumb'] = @$thumbnails[3]['url'];
            $data['id'] = $entry->getVideoId();
            $data['flash_player'] = $entry->getFlashPlayerUrl();
            $data['tags'] = implode(',', $tags) . ', ' . $entry->getVideoCategory();
            // do whatever you want with the data
        }
    }
 
    public function readRssAction()
    {
        $userId = 'some_user';
        $client = new Zend_Http_Client();
        $gdata = new Zend_Gdata_YouTube($client, 'my-app', null, $this->_apiKey);
        $videoFeed = $gdata->getUserUploads($userId);
 
        // save the last items
        $this->_process($videoFeed);
 
        try {
            while ($videoFeed = $videoFeed->getNextFeed()) {
                $this->_process($videoFeed);
            }
        } catch (Zend_Gdata_App_Exception $e) {
            echo $e->getMessage();
        }
    }
}

Note: here you’ve to substitute the API key with the one you’ve for your development.