PHP

I had a situation the other day where I had an application in Zend Framework and I wanted to redirect a user to another page. This is fine if you are inside a controller as you can use the _redirect() controller helper, but in this instance I was running the code from inside a plugin and so therefore didn't have direct access to the controller.

The solution is to use the getResponse() method, which is accessible to plugins, and which will retrieve the response object. The response object has a function called setRedirect() that is used to redirect. Any headers that have been issued will be overwritten by this function. The following code can be run inside your zend framework plugins to redirect the user to a different page.

What? Don't worry, I can't say it either. It is officially called the Scope Resolution Operator (but also just a double colon) and is used to reference static properties and functions of a class. It is also used to reference overridden functions of classes.

To reference a constant of a class you do something similar to the following.

class MyClass {
 const CONST_VALUE = 'A constant value';
}
 
echo MyClass::CONST_VALUE;

To call a static function or a parameter you need to include the word static in the function or parameter definition. You can then reference this function through the scope resolution operator.

After setting up your session management in your application using one of the Zend_Auth adapters you might want to allow users to stay logged in. What you need to do is set some configuration options in the Zend_Session object. Zend_Auth uses Zend_Session as an object orientated way of manipulating the $_SESSION variable. Any changes you make to the Zend_Session object will affect the Zend_Auth object, as long as you set these options before the sessions are started.

There are a number of configuration options available, but for the effect I was looking for I only needed to change the ones below. You might not need to set all of these, but it gave me the best cross browser behaviour.

If you followed the tutorial on installing PHPDoc then you are probably wondering how to get started actually writing the documentation. PHPDoc will parse all the files given to it and look for comment blocks, it will then use these blocks to create the documentation for your application. A valid PHPDoc comment block must start with a '/**', have a '*' on every line and finish with '*/'. The comment must appear before the section that is being commented upon and any lines within the comment without a '*' will be ignored by the parser.

To create some sample documentation we will use the following useless class.

Some of you might be surprised that you can print directly to a printer of your choice through PHP. This uses a PECL extension but is only available on Windows. It is possible to print using UNIX systems, but you have to call the ps program using the system function.

To install the printer functions on Windows you need to download the PECL library for Windows, found at pecl4win.php.net. Unzip this file and move the file php_printer.dll to your extensions directory in your PHP directory (usually called ext).

Next, open up your php.ini file and add the following line at the end of the extensions list.

extension=php_printer.dll

Then add the following lines at the bottom of the file. This tells PHP what printer to use as a default. If the printer is locally installed then PHP only needs the name.

PHPDocumentor is a fast and convent way of creating API documentation for your PHP programs and classes. If you are familiar with the world of Java, it works in much the same way as the JavaDoc program, indeed, it is based on this program.

PHPDocumentor can be run in a number of different ways, but I have found that the easiest way is to, again, use PEAR to install everything you need. To install PHPDocumentor using PEAR use the following command.

phpdoc install phpdocumentor

To run PHPDocumentor and see a list of commands just type in the following:

phpdoc -h

To run PHPDocumentor you need to provide a couple of options, these are:

PHPUnit is a powerful unit testing framework written in and for PHP. Rather than testing everything as a whole the idea behind PHPUnit is to test that everything works as it is expected to work before it is integrated into the rest of the program. In this way problems are found earlier rather than later and this makes fixing them a lot easier. With tests written for every small component of the program it is then possible to test the whole thing by running all of the tests at once. It is also possible to automate PHPUnit so that everything about a program is tested before it is built. If any tests fail then the build is stopped.

The best way to install PHPUnit is to use the PEAR installer. To install PHPUnit you first need to add the correct channel so that PEAR can find PHPUnit easily. You do this by typing the following into the command line.

PHPUnit is a unit testing framework, written in PHP, and which is used to test PHP code. You can integrate the testing that PHPUnit does into Phing. You might want to use Phing to create a nightly build that contains the latest version of your program. The last thing you want is Phing to create a nightly build that is riddled with errors.

The way around this is to use PHPUnit to test our code whilst we are running Phing. If any tests fail then Phing will not finish the build.

Create a target at the top of your build.xml file and make sure it is run first. Then add the following code to the target, This will use PHPUnit to test your code.

Building your projects into directories is nice, but distributing these projects is difficult if you have to build the compressed files yourself. Phing has the ability to create zip and tar files using simple commands.

The most convenient way of using the tar and zip commands is by using a fileset. But rather than use the fileset that was used to copy the files into the build directory it is best to create a separate fileset that is used to compress the contents of the build directory.

After following the last post on deleting files and directories in Phing you might now be wondering if you can create things as well. The answer is yes.

To create a directory with Phing you need to use the mkdir element. The dir attribute is used to give the name of the directory to be created. The following example will create a directory called myProject_build in the current working directory (ie. where you are running phing from).

<mkdir dir="myProject_build" />

That is about as complicated as the mkdir element gets, although you can also pass a parameter to the dir attribute.