Wojciech Sznapka Web Technologies

Testing in isolation with Symfony2 and WebTestCase

2013-10-24

It’s extremely important to have same state of the System Under Test. In most of the cases it will be possible by having same contents in a database for every test. I’ve decribed how to achieve it in Fully isolated tests in Symfony2 blog post about two years ago (btw. it’s most popular post on this blog). It was the time, when PHP’s Traits weren’t that popular.

Injecting repositories to service in Symfony2

2013-10-16

It is generally a good idea to wrap business logic into services. Often, such services methods use doctrine’s repositories to operate on data storage. Injecting whole EntityManager service is a very popular approach, but it isn’t the most elegant way I could think of. EntityManager works only as a factory in that case and could lead to usage of other repositories, which might end up with too many responsibilities of given service.
The better way is to inject single repositories, using a factory-service mechanism, provided by the Dependency Injection Container.f

Thoughts after Symfony Live Berlin 2012

2012-12-03

Lately I had a great opportunity to attend to Symfony Live conference in Berlin. That was our second chance to meet Symfony community after successful edition in London this year.

Is Symfony2 a MVC framework?

2012-11-04

Is Symfony2 a MVC framework? This question in tricky and you can’t see answer at the first moment when you visit symfony.com website. Even more – MVC pattern isn’t mentioned in elevator pitches in „What is Symfony” section. Most of PHP developers will tell you promptly, that this is Model View Controller implementation without a doubt.

The question is: where is Model layer in Symfony2? My answer is: there’s ain’t one and it’s good.

Always use most latest versions for benchmarks

2012-01-25

In my previous post Modern framework comparison I presented performance tests, which compared Ruby On Rails, Django and Symfony2. After recieving a feedback in comments I decided to run this benchmark one more time on my own laptop (instead of on my hosting). The reason was simple: enviroment was outdated. I installed mod_python and configured it easily and struggled about one day with phussion passenger (AKA mod_rails) with ruby 1.9, but finally everything works. The results is compared in table below.

Why Mockery is better than PHPUnit Mock Builder and how to integrate it with Symfony2

2011-11-01

Recently I did a lot of Test Driven Development on my Symfony2 bundle. I used PHPUnit’s built-in mocks and stubs for many projects, so I took it again. But while I was working on mocking Symfony2 core objects I found those mocks very uncomfortable in use. I tried Mockery and it saved my day. Let’s see how to get it working with Symfony2 and how it kicks ass!

Use Proxy-Object in Symfony2 applictions to test non-public methods

2011-10-23

Generally, it’s not a good idea to unit test protected or private methods, but in some cases it could be useful. Of course we don’t want to change our class contract, and expose those methods as a public ones, just becasue we want to test them with PHPUnit. This case can be solved with Proxy-Object library. It provides easy-to-use way to get protected classes to the surface. More about that is here http://blog.bastian-feder.de/blog/029_proxyObject.html. Here I’ll show how to integrate proxy object into your Symfony2 application:

How to add a custom class to form field in Symfony2

2011-10-18

Today I needed to add a custom class to textarea field, to achieve TinyMCE field rendering (with help of http://symfony2bundles.org/stfalcon/TinymceBundle). It wasn’t such straightforward like I thought… I tried:

But it threw exception, that attribute „class” is undefined, so I need to solve it in other way. Thank god I use Twig, so I tried form theming (in template with form). Only thing you need to do is to find out html ID of the textarea field (in my case: wowo_bundle_newsletterbundle_newslettertype_mailing_body). Then you need to add a „_” on the front and „_widget” on the end and class=”tinymce” is there for you.

The solution is simple and powerful, Symfony2 has proven its quality again 🙂

UPDATE 19.10.2011
As Florian and Stloyd mentioned in comments, setting custom class can be done in elegant way, which ain’t included in the documentation yet.

UPDATE 29.10.2011

After my contribution, „attr” element is now documented in official Symfony2 docs http://symfony.com/doc/current/reference/forms/types/field.html

Loosening dependencies with closures in PHP

2011-09-27

Today I ran into a little issue: how to pass generic logger object to method? I wanted to get some verbose output from method, which I call from Command, but onc time it should log with Symfony2 OutputInterface and other time it should use monolog logger. Of course I can make some wrapper class for both of them, but it would be kind of an overkill. The Closure from PHP 5.3 came with solution. In calling method I created closure like this:

On the second hand I’ve got:

As you can see I don’t need to care about logging – just call the closure with message and it will log it properly, depending on context.

Moja prezentacja o Symfony2 i dedykowanym oprogramowaniu z InternetBeta 2011

2011-09-15

Poniżej slajdy z mojej prezentacji, którą wygłosiłem na InternetBeta 2011 w Rzeszowie. Zapraszam do zapoznania się z slajdami.