What happens if you have to write a getUserArticles method? Where would you put it? Whether this will be the User model or the Article model?

Although technically you can put it in both models my advice is to look at the SQL query. If the FROM clause is containing the user table – than put the method in the User model, but here you’d have something like:

SELECT * FROM Article WHERE user_id = 1

I’d prefer to place it in the Article model!

Since native RSS format is not designed to deliver media content, there is a need for newer format supporting video and audio. There is such format – Media RSS introduced by Yahoo! in 2004. Actually now RSS supports some king of pseudo audio and video with the enclosure tag.

Although there is a standardized format, there is not a Zend Framework native module. There is however a proposal, but that’s far not enough.

Possible Solutions

For me there are two possible solutions. The first is writing Zend_Feed_Mrss and extend the Zend_Feed_Rss functionality, but that appears to be a non-trivial task. The second solution is to write custom view returning XML, which I’m choosing for now. I hope I can paste some code soon!

Typically Zend Framework is setup to bind every controller’s action to a specific view. The names of the action and the view script must be the same, or at least must be similar – following the ZF’s convention.

Thus if you name an action, let’s say, indexAction(), you’ve to create an index.phtml file into the views/scripts/index/ folder. Let me remind you that this is what is called a typical setup, but this may vary from one installation to another.

Thus everything’s fine and the MVC does its best. After the user requests a specific uri, the framework parses it and finds the controller, than the action and than the view script – and there is a view script for every single action.

When there are two or more actions – there are two or more .phtml (view scripts) files.

Some Exceptions

Sometimes you have very similar logic, but very different markup between two actions. As the logic goes to the controller/action and the markup into the view, the question is can you simply have one action in the controller, but with two different .phtml file as a view scripts? Of course switching between those two (or more) with some conditionals.

Solution No. 1

However once I posted a simple, and working, solution. There you have again two actions and two scripts:

view->title = "My Title";
		
		// if the logic requires a different markup
		// simply redirect to another view
		if (some_expression) {
			$this->_forward('second');	
		}	
	}
	
	public function secondAction()
	{}
}

// in the application/views/scripts/index
// 1. first.phtml
title ?>

// 2. second.phtml
title ?>

As you can see in the second action there’s no logic – it’s only serving the role of a bridge between the views. Everything is setup into the first action, but the second action is doing the relation with the second.phtml view script.

Solution No. 2

However there’s another solution with only one action and two scripts which makes something like that shown on the diagram bellow:

The only thing to do is to add some code to your action:

view->title = "My Title";
		
		// if the logic requires a different markup
		// simply redirect to another view
		if (some_expression) {
			echo $this->view->render('index/second.phtml');
			$this->_helper->viewRenderer->setNoRender(true);
		}	
	}
}

// in the application/views/scripts/index
// 1. first.phtml
title ?>

// 2. second.phtml
title ?>

Note that you’ve to setNoRender on the view renderer once you render the other script!

This is important because the header is changed and if something goes after the redirect there will be some problems. Finally the correct snippet is:

public function() {
	$this->_redirect('some_url');
	exit();	
}

1. Write a human readable source file

In fact you can do this even without Zend_Translate. Image you’ve an ini file with some pairs like:

lblMyLabel = "My Label"

Nobody says this cannot be “more” human readable – like so:

My Label = "My Label"

Than you can support several files i.e. en.ini, de.ini, etc. where you can translate this label. The problem is that once you read the ini file you’ve to deal with those white spaces into the labels, while with Zend_Translate you can simply call them with:

$translate->_("My Label");

2. Default values for missing labels

Zend_Translate forces you to define a source file. Which is really great, because you always have a default value. Assuming that you don’t have a specific label translated in one of the ini files, you’ll get the default value from the source file, and defining source and other files is as easy as:

// en.ini
My Label = "My Label"

// de.ini
...

// while the locale is de_DE you'll have 
// the default value returned
$translate->_("My Label"); // will return My Label from the en.ini

3. Locales

It’s really great that you can directly setup a locale for this module. Thus you have more flexibility when switching between languages and you can benefit from the power of the framework when reading some browser specific locales. Here’s some code:

$translate = new Zend_Translate('ini', 'en.ini', 'en');
$translate->addTranslation('de.ini', 'de');

// than when you setup the translation locale
$translate->setLocale('en');

4. Cache

One of the greatest things about Zend_Translate is the native support of cache. It’s so cool! Actually the labels of a large web system are pretty static and don’t change every day. In other hand in large scale systems there are lots of labels, and the load time will be faster with cache.

$frontendOptions = array('lifetime' => 600, 'automatic_serialization' => true);
$backendOptions  = array('cache_dir' => 'path_to_cache_dir');

$cache = Zend_Cache::factory('Core', 'File', $frontendOptions, $backendOptions);

Zend_Translate::setCache($cache);

It’s a great advantage to use Zend_Translate after all this. Actually I have finished projects without any use of it, but I really can’t imagine how I’ll work now without it!

I’ve added the very minimum of properties for a feed entry – title, pubDate, link and description, but the resulting date is … the current date instead of the date specified in the pubDate property? Is there any way to fix it?

I had the format_type set to PHP and even though I formatted the dates with a Zend Framework specific format: “d MMM yyyy”.

Zend_Date::setOptions(array('format_type' => 'php'));
// ...
$date = new Zend_Date($somedate);
echo $date->get('d MMM yyyy');

Now as it appears format_type php in 1.10.3 is giving completely different result, and the correct format is date() like format in PHP.

Zend_Date::setOptions(array('format_type' => 'php'));
// ...
$date = new Zend_Date($somedate);
echo $date->get('d M yy');

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);

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.

I’m used to validate the form in a typical Zend Framework application with Zend_Validate or course. It gives you the absolute power to use the build in classes for standard validation, as well as write your custom validation classes.

The problem I had was a bit odd! Zend_Validate_Alnum is supposed to filter all characters and numbers, but what about non Latin symbols!? The project I’m working on is multilingual and there are eight languages, including Arabic, Chinese and Russian! All these were incorrectly !not validated by Zend_Validate_Alnum, although there were only letters and numbers!

In fact whatever the string encoding was – it doesn’t seem to work! Perhaps I’m wrong, but so far this is the situation.

Recent Update

After few test I figured out the problem was not in Zend_Validate at all! My mistake the solution is:

iconv_set_encoding('input_encoding', 'UTF-8');
iconv_set_encoding('output_encoding', 'UTF-8');
iconv_set_encoding('internal_encoding', 'UTF-8');