1. MVC IN S YMFONY Sayed Ahmed B.Sc. Eng. in Computer Science & Engineering M. Sc. in Computer Science Exploring Computing for 14+ years sayed@justetc.net http://sayed.justetc.net 10/8/2011 sayed@justetc.net 1

2. MVC D ESIGN P ATTERN Model: defines the business logic the database belongs to this layer Classes and files related to models are stored in lib/model/ directory View: is what the user interacts with a template engine is part of this layer the View layer is mainly made of PHP templates stored in various templates/ directories Controller: is a piece of code that calls the Model to get some data that it passes to the View for rendering to the client. all requests are managed by front controllers (index.php and frontend_dev.php) These front controllers delegate the real work to actions. these actions are logically grouped into modules 10/8/2011 2 sayed@justetc.net

3. MVC IN P ICTURE 10/8/2011 3 sayed@justetc.net

4. T HE L AYOUT The pages generated by Symfony by default has similar structure such as Header Template/Body Footer We can separate the Headers and Footers from each page and place them in a single central place and link them (header and footer files) to all pages We can use a Design Pattern for the purpose decorator design pattern http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decorator_pattern 10/8/2011 4 sayed@justetc.net

5. T HE D ECORATOR P ATTERN 10/8/2011 5 sayed@justetc.net

6. T HE D ECORATOR P ATTERN 10/8/2011 6 sayed@justetc.net

7. D ECORATION IN S YMFONY the template is decorated after the content is rendered by a global template called a layout in symfony 10/8/2011 7 sayed@justetc.net

8. D ECORATION IN S YMFONY The default layout of an application is called layout.php and can be found in the apps/frontend/templates/ directory This directory contains all the global templates for an application Important: You can modify the layout to include all the extra stuff that you need for all pages including the headers and footers You can replace the default symfony layout with your own layout and create a section for the body/template In the example layout file http://www.symfony-project.org/jobeet/1_4/Doctrine/en/04 $sf_content is the main content/template as seen in the pictures of the page $sf_content is the generated HTML based on the current page it is defined by the framework itself and contains the HTML generated by the action. 10/8/2011 8 sayed@justetc.net

9. I MAGE, CSS, AND JS F ILES web/images/ web/css/ the generate:project task has created three directories for the project assets: web/images/ for images, web/~css|CSS~/ for stylesheets, and web/js/ for JavaScripts 10/8/2011 9 sayed@justetc.net

10. H ELPER A helper is a function, defined by symfony, that can take parameters and returns HTML code. Most of the time, helpers are time-savers, they package code snippets frequently used in templates The include_stylesheets() helper generates tags for stylesheets. 10/8/2011 10 sayed@justetc.net

11. H ELPER, S TYLESHEETS, AND V IEW The stylesheet files can be included by the include_stylesheets() function call But how does the helper know which stylesheets to include? Using View layer View layer generated by generate:app 10/8/2011 11 sayed@justetc.net

12. V IEW LAYER GENERATED BY GENERATE : APP FOR THE TEMPLATE ‘ LAYOUT ’ 10/8/2011 12 sayed@justetc.net

13. S TYLESHEETS, AND V IEW stylesheets: [main.css, jobs.css, job.css] symfony prefixes relative paths with /~css|CSS~/. Change media stylesheets: [main.css, jobs.css, job.css, print: { media: print }] The view.yml configuration file can be customized on a per-module basis create a view.yml file in the apps/frontend/modules/job/config/ directory # apps/frontend/modules/job/config/view.yml indexSuccess: stylesheets: [jobs.css] showSuccess: stylesheets: [job.css] 10/8/2011 13 sayed@justetc.net

14. T EMPLATES indexSuccess and showSuccess sections are the template names associated with the index and show actions respectively 10/8/2011 14 sayed@justetc.net

15. C ONFIGURATION P RINCIPLES IN SYMFONY Configuration Principles in symfony For many symfony configuration files, the same setting can be defined at different levels: The default configuration is located in the framework The global configuration for the project (in config/) The local configuration for an application (in apps/APP/config/) The local configuration restricted to a module (in apps/APP/modules/MODULE/config/) At runtime, the configuration system merges all the values from the different files if they exist and caches the result for better performance. use_stylesheet() helper can be used (in the template file) to include a stylesheet from a template: Instead of using view.yml 10/8/2011 15 sayed@justetc.net

16. L INKING TO JAVA S CRIPT FILES Symmetrically, the JavaScript configuration is done via the javascripts entry of the view.yml configuration file and the use_javascript() helper defines JavaScript files to include for a template. use_javascript() helper defines JavaScript files to include for a template. 10/8/2011 16 sayed@justetc.net

17. A CTIONS AND TEMPLATES The index action is the Controller part of the page and the associated template, indexSuccess.php, is the View part: 10/8/2011 17 sayed@justetc.net

18. T HE A CTION Each action is represented by a method of a class For the job homepage, the class is jobActions (the name of the module suffixed by Actions) and the method is executeIndex() (execute suffixed by the name of the action). It retrieves all the jobs from the database 10/8/2011 18 sayed@justetc.net

19. T HE T EMPLATE By default, the template name associated with an action is deduced by symfony 10/8/2011 19 sayed@justetc.net

20. T HE " FORWARD " M ETHODS F AMILY $this->forward404If(!$this->job); $this->forward404(); $this->forward('default', '404'); 10/8/2011 20 sayed@justetc.net

21. T HE R EQUEST AND THE R ESPONSE The Request The sfWebRequest class wraps the $_SERVER, $_COOKIE, $_GET, $_POST, and $_FILES PHP global arrays: Method name -- PHP equivalent getMethod() -- $_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] getUri() $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] getReferer() $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] getHost() $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] getLanguages() $_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE'] getCharsets() $_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET'] isXmlHttpRequest() $_SERVER['X_REQUESTED_WITH'] == 'XMLHttpRequest' getHttpHeader() $_SERVER getCookie() $_COOKIE isSecure() $_SERVER['HTTPS'] getFiles() $_FILES getGetParameter() $_GET getPostParameter() $_POST getUrlParameter() $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] getRemoteAddress() $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] 10/8/2011 21 sayed@justetc.net

22. T HE R ESPONSE The Response The sfWebResponse class wraps the header() and setrawcookie() PHP methods: Method name PHP equivalent setCookie() setrawcookie() setStatusCode() header() setHttpHeader() header() setContentType() header() addVaryHttpHeader() header() addCacheControlHttpHeader() header() 10/8/2011 22 sayed@justetc.net

23. REFERENCES http://www.symfony-project.org/jobeet/1_4/Doctrine/en/05 10/8/2011 23 sayed@justetc.net