Tag Archives: PHP

Inline Scripts with Zend_View_Helper_InlineScript

javascript, micro tutorial, PHP, zend framework, , , , , , , ,

Once I’ve posted about Zend Framework and script injections into the view of the app. However back than I didn’t mentioned the way the scripts can be injected on whatever place into the markup. This job’s done by Zend_View_Helper_InlineScript and that’s only an abstraction over the HeadScript.

However thus the PHP code goes quite clean and maintainable.

$scripts = $this->view->inlineScript();
$scripts->appendFile('/scripts/production.js');

This is quite interesting because in the case of multiple scripts you can chain them into this:

$scripts = $this->view->inlineScript();
$scripts->appendFile('/scripts/production.js')
            ->appendFile('/scripts/development.js')

But that’s not everything. Although it looks very pretty and clean, PHP gives you the correct syntax of something like this:

$scripts = $this->view->inlineScript();
$scripts
            ->appendFile('/scripts/production.js')
            ->appendFile('/scripts/development.js')

And that’s particularly good when it comes to fast switching between production and development scripts includes.

$scripts = $this->view->inlineScript();
$scripts
 //        ->appendFile('/scripts/production.js')
            ->appendFile('/scripts/development.js')

You’d ask why I’d to comment my script includes. Because as it appears to be fashionable the JavaScripts are concatenated and compressed. This gives you performance benefits on the client side when downloading and executing the script. So it’s usual to have one compressed/minified and several development scripts. That’s why this commenting strategy is very useful.

Detecting POST Requests in Zend Framework

micro tutorial, PHP, zend framework, , , , ,

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!

How to Sanitize User Input in PHP?

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It’s a question almost every PHP developer asks yourself. By me the most simple way to sanitize the user input is to save everything in the database with no loosing of tags or whatever HTML markup and than on displaying this on the client side to strip_tags if needed.

In example when saving a HTML formatted text you can use simply the htmlspecialchars method

$description = htmlspecialchars($_POST['description']);

Than you can be sure everything’s in the database, but it’s not actually HTML. Thus you don’t have any tags at all in the database field.

When you show this in the client side and you’d like to strip some tags, i.e. to keep only the <a> tag you can do this:

echo strip_tags(htmlspecialchars_decode($description), '<a>');

That’s the most simple way to keep everything as the original source. By me it’s better to keep whatever HTML markup there is on the input.