Tag Archives: World Wide Web

Check YouTube Video Existence with Zend_Gdata_YouTube

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The Video Has Been Removed?!

Have you ever seen the famous message on YouTube: “This video has been removed by the user.”, but what if you’re trying to grab that video via the Zend_Gdata_YouTube?

That can happen when you’re reading the feed for a channel or a user’s list of videos. In the feed everything’s OK – once the video is uploaded it appears into the feed. After that the user removes the video and visiting the link from the feed you’ll get the message above.

Actually what happens when you try to read this “video entry” within a Zend Framework’s application. There must be some way to catch this message?

Trying to Catch

The answer is pretty simple! Zend_Gdata_YouTube’s throwing an exception and it can be easily cached. Here’s some source code:

$apiKey = 'your_api_key';
$client = new Zend_Http_Client();
$gdata = new Zend_Gdata_YouTube($client, 'my-app', null, $apiKey);
try {
       $gdata->getVideoEntry($video_id);
} catch(Zend_Gdata_App_Exception $e) {
       echo $e->getMessage();
}

Inline Scripts with Zend_View_Helper_InlineScript

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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

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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!?

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.

Setting a Zend Framework _redirect Referer

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Seems to be impossible, just because the only parameters you can set are far less than setting a referrer. Thus you’ve to rely on your browser capabilities. However the most reliable way is to redirect with referrer in mind. Something like _GET parameters.

$this->_redirect('/url/return-to/1');

Once this parameter is processed by the controller/action you can return to the referrer!