First, we need to create a file to hold the settings. It’s ordinary plaintext and follows the INI format.

Here is a quick sample of some key / value pairs:

[general]
locale = no_NO
company.name = MyCompany

datasource.host = localhost
datasource.database = mydb
datasource.username = user
datasource.password = 1234

The class for accessing the file:

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class MyConfigClass{
  protected $config;
 
    public function __construct()
    {
      $this->config = parse_ini_file('../conf/myapp.ini');
 
    }
 
    public function getConfig($key = null)
    {
      if($key !== null)
      {
        if(isset($this->config[$key]))
        {
          return $this->config[$key];
        }
        else
        {
          throw new Exception("Unknown key '$key' in configuration");
        }
      }
      else
      {
        return $this->config;
      }
    }
 
    public function setConfig($config)
    {
 
      $this->config = $config;
    }
}
 
?>

Usage:

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$configManager = new MyConfigClass();
 
$value = $configManager->getConfig['datasource.host'];

Now, when working on larger application one usually have a application like class, and that’s a nice place to put this code. When using Prado I usually place the config code in the TApplication class.

Technorati Tags: PHP

Update:

John has some more information on this issue if the above didnt do the trick:

I also needed to link to the new plugin….

cd /usr/lib/firefox-3.0/plugins$
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so

Thanks John!

Technorati Tags: Java, Firefox

You can check it out at http://regex.larsolavtorvik.com/. Stop by his blog as well.

Technorati Tags: PHP, Perl, JavaScript, Python

Be sure to head on over to the FPDF site and FPDI site for more information on these two libs.

Related posts:
Generated PDFs over HTTPS with Internet Explorer

Technorati Tags: PHP, PDF, Frameworks

Update: Video removed, please check the links above.

Technorati Tags: PHP, Testing, Frameworks

Technorati Tags: PHP, Prado, Frameworks

Jonathan Street has posted an article called Is PHP good enough for science? where he asks if anyone has experience with PHP in scientific contexts. I think PHP easily could be used to automate tasks, but I’m not aware of any toolkits or frameworks created for this purpose. Anyone seen anything like this around? If so, drop him a line.

Technorati Tags: PHP

Also, all code is now syntax highlighted

This post is pretty much a revamp of a previous post called “Working with X-Fire soap services and inheritance in PHP“. That title was a bit misleading, and not really that good when it came to providing a sample.

Let’s say we have a SOAP method called createCustomer(Customer c), and we have a base class called Customer, which has to subclasses, Person and Organization. Person has firstname, lastname, while Organization as orgname and orgid. Now, the createCustomer call accepts a object of the class Customer, and any derived classes.

When retrieving a Person / Organization over SOAP, PHP automatically creates instances of the correct classes, but when calling createCustomer, passing a Person / Organization it breaks. Out object is sent as a Customer, but with Person or Organization fields added. The SOAP server expects to find a xsi:type for the object we are sending to tell what kind of Customer it is. It seems like PHP does not set this itself (maybe it should?).

I spent quite some time looking for info on how to specify the xsi:type for the objects, and I finally came across SoapVar.

I created a base class which the SOAP classes extended. A method called pack is responsible for setting xsi:type.

(I’m very aware that my pasted code looks like a mess in this blog. I will fix that ASAP).

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class BaseClass{
  private  $namespace = "http://model.api.domain.com"; // from your WSDL
  protected function pack($obj){
    $class_name = get_class($obj);
    $namespace = "http://model.api.domain.com";
    $pack = new SoapVar($obj, XSD_STRING, "$class_name", $namespace);
    return $pack;
  }
}
 
class createCustomer extends BaseClass{
  public function setCustomer($customer){
    $this->customer = $this->pack($customer);
  }
}
 
$customer = new Person();
$customer->setName("John Doe");
 
$request = new createCustomer();
$request->setAccountID(123);
$request->setCustomer($customer);
 
$client->createCustomer($request);

That fixed the problems for me atleast.

PS: If your SOAP classes are prefixed you’ll need to strip the prefix in class_name when creating the SoapVar.

Related posts:

• Working with X-Fire soap services and inheritance in PHP
• Array problems with SOAP and PHP - Updated

Technorati Tags: PHP, SOAP

Update:

I guess I didn’t make the purpose quite clear here. This method will allow you to show custom error messages when PHP hits a fatal error. The shutdown function will always run.

Scripts tend to die, and that’s not usually nice. We do not want to show the user a fatal error nor a blank page (display errors off) . PHP has a function called register_shutdown_function which lets us set up a function which is called at execution shutdown. What this means is that our function will be executed when our script is done executing / dying and PHP execution is about to shut down. By setting up a variable to false at the start of our script, and setting it to true at the very end of the script we can have our shutdown function check if the script completed successfully or not. If our variable is still false we know that we never made it to the last line of our script, hence it died somewhere. I’ve prepared a very basic sample which shows how you can give the user some proper feedback if a fatal error should arise. You’d want to turn of display of fatal errors for this to look nice.

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$clean = false;
function shutdown_func(){
  global $clean;
  if (!$clean){
    die("not a clean shutdown");
  }
}
 
register_shutdown_function('shutdown_func');
 
$a = 1;
$a = new FooClass(); // will fail with fatal
 
$clean = true;
?>

As you can see, the shutdown_func prints something if the clean variable isn’t set to true when the shutdown function runs. This should of course be wrapped in a class (and NOT use globals), and for something more usable I recommend checking EZ Components way of doing this.