Tag: symfony

Symfony2 and “ContextErrorException: Warning: SessionHandler::read()” Exception

I just upgraded to Symfony 2.4, and started randomly getting this error:

ContextErrorException: Warning: SessionHandler::read(): open(/var/lib/php/session/sess_3cq63tff1lhbghus3o9jsh26j4, O_RDWR) failed: No such file or directory (2) in /var/www/codeconsortium.com/public/vendor/symfony/symfony/src/Symfony/Component/HttpFoundation/Session/Storage/Proxy/SessionHandlerProxy.php line 69

Which was pretty odd, as there is a discussion about this, which you can find here on symfony/symfony github, However the issue seems to be in part with PHP, but it was for me already patched. As the issue is introduced in 5.4 somewhere and fixed in 5.4.11.

It seems that everything was fixed, and i was many versions ahead. So why was this cropping up randomly now? I had not changed my PHP version or my OS version, just symfony.

It seems some config changed, which i show below. If you do not have this set, then i believe it falls back on the default php.ini setting of session.cookie_path, which if blank causes this. Add this config below will fix the issue.

I hope this helps.

Behat and “The current node list is empty.” error.

If your receiving the error “The current node list is empty” while using Behat, then likely your project is returning an HTTP 500 error. This may be because your bundle depends on some other bundle not available in your test environment. This was the case when for me when testing a bundle on travis-ci and i was not able to find documentation on this error.

One solution as suggested on github is to try dumping the contents of the scraper/browser to see what kind of error your getting.

However that will likely not give you any output if the server is returning an HTTP 500 internal server error. Your best bet is to just check your logs and do a search for any errors.

If your trying to run your functional tests on travis-ci then you might want to check out this great article on running Behat scenarios in isolation of your project.

Best of luck.

Set date (x)days from now in Behat with Symfony2 forms

Using Behat i needed to be able to set a date in a form (x) number of days from the current date. This however is a problem as Behat cannot set a date (x) number of days from now as it does not know the current date. So a simple solution is to create a Behat step definition that takes the field name and a number of days. My step definition looks something like this:

The reason i went with a CSS selector is because Behat supports this anyway, and Symfony2 can create a date form by splitting the field into 3 separate fields, for Month/Day and Year respectively. So we will need to identify 3 fields in our form. Symfony2 will label them with each with the overall field name with an additional underscore and designation. Each field will be a select field.

For example, if my field is called Post_unlockedUntilDate (which was a real field i needed this test case for [the Post_ designation came from symfony based on the entity the form related to), then the 3 fields i would need to find (as created by symfony) would be:

  • Post_unlockedUntilDate_year
  • Post_unlockedUntilDate_month
  • Post_unlockedUntilDate_day

So i created a step definition that takes the CSS and finds the fields by the given selector. Then identifies each field in the results and assigns them to an array with a key for ‘day’, ‘month’ and ‘year’. Then all we need to do is create a new datetime object set (x) number of days from now and then apply that to each field.

So to use it we just call:

Hope this helps. Good luck.

Simple Method for Checking for Order With Behat

While needing to write a test to check the order of 2 items (within a given CSS query) in Behat, I did a little googling and came across this website here.

The tutorial is great and i just wanted to give a shout out to the author for their great content. I also made a slight change to include testing for the existing of the 2 items.

Here is my slightly updated version:

You can see an example of the test i wrote using this method here.

Sorting/Reording Symfony2 Entities Display Order.

So i had to implement a mechanism to re-order Categories and also Boards for my forum bundle, and with though there are many ways to go about it, here is how i solved the problem of reordering them. The reordering functionality is circular so last items getting pushed down end up on the top of the list, and top items getting pushed up end up on the bottom of the list.

What do you guys think? Know of a better approach? Let me know!

Custom Validators on Validation Groups in Symfony2.

If you are using validation groups and have created a custom validator, you will want to use it in your validation group, however its a bit different from how you would apply validators in the entity, and quite similar in-fact to how you define services.

Its similar to how you define services because you have 2 root nodes, first somewhat like services.yml’s parameters line, in this instance called ‘namespaces’, the second part matches the entities name which the validator will be applied to.

Starting out, your validator.yml file probably looks like this:

This is an example taken from my AttachmentBundle, which you can find here.

Now, when we have a custom validator, in this case, some validators to check a users quota on file uploads etc, we need to set a namespace for our custom validators, with the namespace parameter, and then reference that namespace below followed by our custom validator.

The name of the validator must be wrapped in double quotes so that Symfony2 is aware that this is using a custom validator, inside of which we first start the namespace, and secondly the validator alias.

We define the alias of our validator in our services.yml like so:

Symfony2 CLI does not connect to MySQL while browser works fine.

So i had an issue that i am still somewhat unsure of the cause, though i suspect the culprit was an upgrade to a newer version of MAMP.

So when using the Symfony2 project in the browser, everything works fine, however on the CLI i get the following:

[PDOException]
SQLSTATE[HY000] [2002] No such file or directory

[ErrorException]
Warning: PDO::__construct(): [2002] No such file or directory (trying to connect via unix:///var/mysql/mysql.sock) in …htdocs/Symfony/vendor/doctrine-dbal/lib/Doctrine/DBAL/Driver/PDOConnection.php line 36

So i thought it was pretty odd that the CLI would not connect when the browser did just fine. I tried adding this to my parameters.ini:

Though this seems to have made no difference what so ever. It seems SF2 CLI would ignore the sock file location and was only interested in the sock file located in the /private/var/mysql directory. So the solution is to make a symlink to the sock file thus resolving the issue. Do the following to resolve it:

This should resolve the issue.

Authorisation on Roles in Symfony2

Following a discussion on the IRC room from someone who viewed my post about login/logout handlers in SF2, i wanted to clarify that when dealing with Roles, they should be dealt with in the controller actions.

For off, you need to make sure you got the right hierarchy of roles. In your app/config/security.yml you need something following the structure of:

Where the lowest level of access is at the top and the higher levels of access envelope the last levels of access.

Then you inside your controller actions you would do:

According the order of the role hierarchy if you have the role or higher than specified the controller action will continue, if you have a lower level of access than the minimum required then you will get an AccessDeniedException.

Redirecting on login/logout in Symfony2 using LoginHandlers.

Using login handlers or even logout handlers, we can do a number of last minute things before the user is redirected to where they need to go. Being able to intercept the redirect at the last minute and make the user get redirected elsewhere is relatively simple.

Firstly though, i notice a lot of people now who are using Symfony 2 are cheating somewhat by using an EventListener and registering it with the security.interactive_login event listener. This is not the best way to go about this, namely because this event listener is not intended for this purpose. Sometimes event listeners are not the best way to go because they were defined for a specific purpose other than your intention and using them may have undesirable side effects you may not notice right away. Using handlers however allows a little more flexibility in that in all likelihood regardless of changes to Symfony in future revisions, they should still work and were designed specifically for the purposes we will need them for.

Firstly, we need to define our services, personally, i am a fan of YAML, so i define my services as such but feel free to do the same in XML:

Now our services are defined, we need to define the handlers themselves. I like to create a directory named Services in my user bundle for this purpose, then create 2 files. The first file is LoginSuccessHandler, the second is LogoutSuccessHandler. Our handlers will implement the appropriate interface for either our login or logout handlers, which require usually only one method in these instances.

Here is what the login handler should look like:

Note my namespace is CCDNUser, and my bundle is called SecurityBundle, so our service is named ccdn_user_security.component.authentication.handler.login_failure_handler. Change this to your own namespace and bundle name accordingly but ensure to use the same format as used here, underscore your namespace and append the bundle name with an additional underscore without the term ‘bundle’ in it. Failure to get this part correct will mean your namespace will not be loaded and you will get problems later on in this tutorial as exceptions will be thrown regarding the service not existing.

Here is what the logout handler should look like:

Our service definitions inject some of the classes we need to make use of our handlers, namely a Router object and the SecurityContext object, we can store these in member variables for later use. Then we wait for the onAuthenticationSuccess method to be called in our LoginSuccessHandler, once this has happened, we have a request and token interface object at our disposal. Using the security context object we can determine what role they have (i.e; ROLE_USER, ROLE_ADMIN etc) and appropriately redirect them as needed.

I like to redirect members of ROLE_USER role to where they came from prior to logging in. This is achieved by passing the ‘referer’ header into the redirect response object we return. I took this step both in the login and logout handlers.

Last thing we now need to do, is inform our security config that it needs to use these handlers by doing the following:

In this instance i am using FOSUserBundle and extending it in my own UserBundle, though this code is contained in the SecurityBundle. Which is probably the best way to do this. As the handlers used here work in any bundle because they plugin to Symfony2 core and implement their login handlers, and should not be dependant on any user bundle.

You can see a complete implementation of this in my security bundle found on github

Once this is implemented your on your way to a better login/logout system. Enjoy.

Symfony Embedded Forms ‘take 2’

Learnt some new things while working with symfony’s embedded forms, as we know, when they are have relations in the entities that the form is modelled after you want to ensure that when including the other form type that you create an instance of the formType representing the many in the manyToOne relationship. For example in the forum i am working on (which you can find on github here though currently still in development as of the date of this blog entry) a Topic has MANY Posts, as a result, we build our form by instantiating the PostType first and then adding the TopicType to it as a field because the PostType has a related Topic in the database schema.

But following up from the last post, what about when we have unique use cases for our form Types? What if we want to use a PostType without including the TopicType or we wish to conditionally decide wether for the purposes of editing we need to populate the form before presenting it?

To make this easier, in my FormHandlers what i choose to do is pass an array with some options we can use, namely a mode key specifies wether we are to ‘insert’ or ‘update’ an entity, and other keys for holding the entity to populate the form if mode is ‘update’

Here is an example from the top half of my TopicFormHandler:

To view the full source in greater context, explore the source on github here.