Symfony and Angular: shared translations

Angular for frontend with symfony delivering the data have become quite a common setup.

When working with this constellation you will sooner or later come across the i18n topic. Most likely you would want to share translations between front- and backend. So that you could keep translations in one single location while using it for frontend templates as well as server-side error messages etc.

One approach would be to store translations in the symfony yml or xml files and deliver those to the frontend via an api endpoint.
Given that front- and backend-code run on the same server, there is an even simpler solution.
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Symfony Cache Component with SncRedisBundle

Since version 3.1 there is a Cache component with a PSR-6 implementation integrated in Symfony.
So we do not need to add a 3rd party lib as Doctrine Cache anymore when we need caching these days.

Doctrine Cache does the job but by implementing a standard the Symfony Cache seems to have another advantage besides its delievered anyway. So i checked it out.

Documentation is still a bit sparse and the best resource so far is this blogpost:
https://symfony.com/blog/new-in-symfony-3-1-cache-component

I wont go into detail on how you use the Cache but rather how you integrate it with Redis, which is my favourite Cache backend.
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Symfony and named ParamConverters

Symfony’s ParamConverter is a common way to transform some GET param to an entity before your controllers action.
This happens most of the time via type hinting and priority detection kinda magic in the background.
But as magic is often obscure sometimes you need a bit of explicitness.

F.e. when you have more and different ParamConverter per entity you want to name them explicitly.
Then you can use named ParamConverters.

In the documentation this issue is a bit fragmented, so here is the compact version:
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[Symfony 2][Assetic] Sass, CompassFilter + Foundation Responsive Front-end Framework

Did you ever wonder how to enable 3rd party plugins (or so called “frameworks“) within the great compass toolset managed by assetic in your edgy symfony 2.1 project?

(If there is more extensive documentation available concerning assetic + CompassFilter, please stop reading on and let me know!)

If you take a look at the filter class itself (it is CompassFilter in the generic Assetic\Filter namespace), you should recognise several option values that you can use in your application wide config.yml file.

But first you have to install the framework plugin following these instructions.

Continue reading “[Symfony 2][Assetic] Sass, CompassFilter + Foundation Responsive Front-end Framework”

Symfony2 from YAML to XML configuration

Actually i was a fan of YAML regarding the configuration files of Symfony2.
This was probably because i was used to it since symfony 1.4 and i also thought its better readable.
Its partly still true, but my Netbeans Editor has some problems with using @ in YAML and this breaks my highlighting.
So the better readability vanished to nirvana.

So i checked out XML configuration. Its also widely used by the community.
Pros and Cons (mostly Pros) you can read in this post by Fabien.

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Caching Data in Symfony2

Symfony2 has a great Caching Layer based on its HTTP Cache. But this aims mainly on caching the views.

In some apps however you need to cache data behind the scenes, f.e. responses from API calls or custom objects sets.
Symfony2 itself doesnt have such a functionality on first sight (symfony2 doesnt, but Doctrine, see below) and so I searched for one and first found a bundle which utilize the Zend Cache lib:
https://github.com/KnpLabs/KnpZendCacheBundle

This worked well but as discussed here(https://github.com/KnpLabs/KnpZendCacheBundle/issues/2) this adds dependencies to your Symfony2 project. This is actually not necessary since Doctrine/Commons is almost always part of your Symfony2 distribution and the Doctrine/Commons provides a Cache Layer as well.
A very good one, indeed.

So if you need to cache data use Doctrine/Commons.
Continue reading “Caching Data in Symfony2”

[Symfony 2] composer.json for a assumed-stable symfony 2 distribution

This small composer.json file is used in a project i am working on atm, feel free to use it at own risk. I will provide non-periodical updates and hopefully soon a full upgrade to symfony 2.1.x including doctrine orm 2.2.x.

I still did not get the point regarding dependency resolution, so i simply “composed” the composer file by writing down my own requirements (“i want only the hottest, newest stuff!!”, then tracked down the error messages, removing them by explicetly writing down the missing dependencies by using the latest “dev-*” versions. After that i tried to run the project, which actually did not work, but selective downgrade of some of the bundles (framework, security-extra blahblah) finally did the job. Continue reading “[Symfony 2] composer.json for a assumed-stable symfony 2 distribution”