I am currently working on a project using Symfony2 and seeking some advice on that.
I am thinking of a hybrid application in two(2) different ways a) Login Page shall use traditional form with CRF Token and let symfonty2 handle it. b) All Inner pages ( which potentially are modules ) I want them to be non AJAX, but the other activities inside that shall behave like a Single Page.
For example I have an employee module. When user clicks on that it is entirely loaded from Server ( all the templates and forms etc ) now each activity under employee module like add/update delete/view etc shall be loaded through AJAX and response to be returned in JSON i.e AngularJS.
I am currently thinking of using FOSUserBundle to return html on initial request and then based on request type Accept: application/json it will return the JSON ( remember the add/updat delete/view part? ).
My question is it a better idea to use Angular Partials (html) files or Symfony2 Twig? or would it be better to use Angular JS, but let those partials be rendered by Symfony2 twig? ( I am thinking of Forms here, would want to validate that both from client and server side )
Has any one been through similar problem, if yes then what approach was used to develop HYBRID application using AngularJS and Symfony2 or any other framework? any relevant ideas are appreciated.
I was in the same situation you are. AngularJS+Symfony2 project, REST API, login using FOSUserBundle, etc.
... And every way has pros and cons, so there is no right way, i'm just gonna say exactly what i did.
I choose AngularJS native templates, no CSRF validation, a base template built using Twig, server-side validation, use of the FOSJSRoutingBundle, and some helpers (BuiltResponse and BaseController).
Why native templates?
With the use of verbatim, we solve the variable problems, but we gonna have a more complex logic in our templates.
We also will have a less scalable application. All our forms templates are doing a request in the Symfony application, and one of the best pros of the AngularJS is load our controllers, templates, etc from a storage service, like S3, or CDN, like Cloudfront. As there is no server-side processing, our templates would load so much faster. Even with caching, Twig is slower, obviously.
And both, Twig and AngularJS templates, are really complex to manage, in my own experience. I started making them together, but was painful to manage.
What i did?
I created static templates in front-end, with the same field names, it's not really good. We need to update the templates every time we update the forms, manually. But was the best way i found. As the field names are equal, we won't have problems to ajust the model names in the Angular controllers.
And if you are creating the software as a service, you will need to do it anyway. Will you not load the form templates from the application in a mobile app, right?
Why no CSRF validation?
We don't use CSRF validation in a REST API, obviously. But, if you wanna do it, you need to make a request every time you load a form, to get the CSRF token. It's really, really bad. So, we create a CRUD, and also we need to create a "csrf-CRUD", 4 routes more. That doesn't make any sense.
What i did?
I disabled the CSRF in the forms.
Base template?!
Yep. A base template is just to load any route in our application. Here is what i'm doing:
This will help us to avoid errors when users are going directly to some Application URL if you are using html5 angularjs urls. Simple like that.
Server-side validation, why?
If we do a validation in the Angular, we need to do the same in the server-side, so we have 2 validation codes to maintain. That is painful. Every change we do in the form, we need to change the validation in the front, validation in the back and also the Angular static form. Really, really painful.
What i did?
I basically did a server-side validation using the Symfony constraints. For every request, the application validates the form and check if any error was found, if yes, it gets the first one and send it as a response.
In the AngularJS, the application checks if there is any error inside of the errors key. So, we have a proccess used in all application to do any form request. It's like that:
And the routes?
There is another problem: the routes. Put the url directly is not a reliable way. If we change anything in the url, that route is gone and the users won't like that.
To fix that, we can use the FOSJsRoutingBundle. With that library, we can put the route name directly in the Angular controller, and it will fill with the exact url of the route. It's completely integrated with the Symfony, so parameters will work very well.
Instead using the url directly, we can do it:
Routing.generate('panel_products_show', {id: $routeParams.product_id});
And voilá! We get the route url.
That will solve the biggest part of the problems you have. But there are more.
Problem 1 - Form inputs
The forms from Symfony generally have a prefix, like "publish_product", so every field has a name like [publish_product]name. Ah, how that was a problem for me.
In the Angular, publish_product is not considered a array. You need to put the single quote to do this, like ['publish_product']name. And it's really bad, we need to change every key to use this format. In AngularJS, i was doing like that:
{{ formData('[publish_product]name') }}
Absolutely stupid.
The best solution was simply remove the form prefix in the Symfony, using the createNamedBuilder method instead just createBuilder. I let the first parameter null, and yeah, we don't need to use the prefix anymore. Now, we use:
{{ formData.name }}
So much better.
Problem 2 - Routes hard do maintain
Every request can return anything, i need to repeat much code. That is really hard to maintain, so i just create some application rules, built responses, a BaseController, etc.
createNamedBuilder
createNamedBuilder is a big method. We need to do this, for every form we have:
It's simple to solve. I just created a BaseController and i'm extending every controller from it. I created a simple method that does it.
For every route, we do not need to repeat 3 lines, much better.
Responses
When my application started growing, i had a serious problem: all my responses are different. That was really hard to maintain. For every request i was doing, sometimes i was using "response", sometimes "data", the error messages were lost in the response, etc.
So, i decided to create a buildResponse, that i just need to set some parameters and i get the same result for every route, even GET routes.
response key shows me the status and the message. It can be error or success, and the message os a optional field, that can come blank. For example, a success status with the message "You created the product".
data key shows me any information i need. For example, the user added the product, and now he needs the link to see it. In the data, i put the url of the post, and i easily can get it from the AngularJS controller.
notifications is a specific key for my business logic. Every action can return a notification to the user.
It doesn't matter what keys you have. The most important thing is have a standardized response, because when your application grows, it will be really helpful.
That is a route from my controller:
Completely standardized. The Scrutinizer code quality tool says all my routes are duplicated. :D
Have a BaseController and a builtResponse will help you so much. When i started refactoring my code, each route lost about 4-10 lines.
Details: getFormError return the first error of the form. Here is my method:
public function getFormError(FormInterface $form)
{
if ($form->getErrors()->current()) {
return $form->getErrors()->current()->getMessage();
}
return 'errors.unknown';
}
... And the parameters from the buildResponse are:
1. Status. I get it from a constant in the BaseController. It can be changed, so i believe is important do not use a string value in each route.
2. The translation message. (I use a preg_match to check if it has a translation format, because getFormError already translates the error).
3. The data (array) parameter.
4. The notifications (array) parameter.
Other problem i'm gonna have
The project just have one supported language until now. When i start to work in a multilingual version, i'm gonna have another big problem: maintain 2 versions of the translations: the back-end messages and validations and the text from the front-end. That probably will be a big problem. When i get the best approach, i'll update this answer.
I took some months to get the this approach. So many code refactorings and probaly much more in the future. So i hope it help someone to do not need to do the same.
1. If i get a better way to do this, i'll update this answer.
2. I'm not good at writing english, so this answer probably will have many grammatical errors. Sorry, i'm fixing what i'm seeing.
I was assigned a task to modify a custom joomla component's search functionality that is only done through ajax, and doesn't have any url/query string handling, so the users cannot go to previous searches through browser back button as well as it is impossible to bookmark a specific search query for sharing etc.
Currently, the search is done by a jquery script that collects all of the form elements' selected values on the page and sends that (with ajax) to a separate controller task (ajax.ajaxSearch) which echoes json with all available results. In the view then there is a code that parses that json and builds an ul list for all items. And the url stays always the same (it's the homepage currently).
What I was thinking to do is in the script that receives the items from the model, to set some history handling ie:
var params = '&beds=2&fireplace=1&kitchen=1';
history.pushState(params, null, '?task=search'+params);
With this I will have urls like www.mysite.com/properties/?task=search&beds=2&fireplace=1&kitchen=1 with back button working and params will be saved in the window.state object which hopefully I could use to re-run the ajax search query with the selected params. And I know I will have to code couple of methods that will take care of such routes like www.mysite.com/properties/?task=search&beds=2&fireplace=1&kitchen=1 to be properly handled when accessed directly.
What I want to know is the approach described above feasible to go after? Is there a maybe better solution that could solve this problem more elegantly and easily ? What would your approach be if faced with similar task?
You can try some history frameworks but anyway if you want the back button to work you need an anchor to move back and foward. I don't see why it shouldn't work.
I'm pretty new to MVC and I'm just thinking ahead to my next project. I haven't been able to find any examples of how to do this, so I apologize if it seems like a question that may have already been answered somewhere else.
I'm going to want to create asynchronous cascading dropdown menus. So menu B will update as the values in menu A change, and menu C will update as either A or B update. What is the normal pattern for this?
Normally, as list events fire, I would use ajax to call a service that would process my input data and return json which I would use to update my lists. In this case, there is no service, only the controller feeding the view. We could create a service, but we prefer not to if at all possible. So I'm wondering if there is a technique in MVC4 that can feed me back what I need to update the view without re-rendering the page.
If someone could refer me to an example or at least explain what I might be looking for, that would be a great help. TIA
You can implement the Ajax callback URL as a controller action (in fact, that is how I typically do it).
There is no need for a separate service.
public class CallbackController : Controller
{
public ActionResult MenuOptions()
{
// return e.g. JSON
}
}
The Ajax URL would be
http://myserver.com/Callback/MenuOptions
There are a lot of answers around the web for this type of functionality. Here is one, and here is another similar example. What you should really do is read up on MVC actions / controllers and do some spiking / messing around.
Building the example starter app will help you get a grasp on the differences between classic ASP.NET and MVC.
I am writing my first Rails app using the twitter gem. I'm simply retrieving search results and trying to cycle through them individually every 5 seconds or so.
My thought was to create a variable and have this variable represent the array index and simply update this variable dynamically with Javascript (every 5 seconds or so). What's the best way to achieve this on the client-side? AJAX? Javascript?
Does this make sense? I will be glad to provide more context if helpful. Thanks.
Sounds you're trying to build a "recent tweets" marquee of some sort. Without knowing your requirements, you could try simply loading the ten most recent tweets in Rails, putting them in ten hidden divs, and then using jQuery just to cycle through the different tweets on the page.
If it is a requirement to "update" the most recent tweets without the user refreshing the page, then yes, you'd probably need an AJAX call.
It's hard to tell what you think you're asking: by the time your JavaScript is executing the server is no longer involved.
If you want to update some sort of count on the server side and persist it in a meaningful way, you can do so via Ajax.
What are you actually trying to do, though?
Ruby runs on the server while JavaScript (usually) runs on the client.
The Ruby generates an HTML document (perhaps with embedded JS) and the server delivers it to the client.
At that stage the Ruby has finished executing. The only way to do anything further with Ruby would be to make a new HTTP request to the server. This could be done by following a link, submitting a form, setting location.href, using XMLHttpRequest or numerous other techniques.
This would cause the Ruby program to be executed again (or a different one to be executed) which would do whatever it did with the input data.
You cannot simply "set a variable" on the server from the client.
In my particular case, I used ruby's .to_json method to convert the data and then manipulated it with javascript. This gave me the flexibility to loop through the data pretty seamlessly. Atleast it seemed to work for my particular situation. Thanks for the help guys!
I'm trying to allow users to vote a record up/down with Ajax. I'm using the vote_fu plugin for the voting functionality, and everything works fine without Ajax. I'm now trying to figure out the best way to implement the asynchronous functionality with unobtrusive javascript.
What I'm doing now is having two buttons, "Up" and "Down", such that when you click either one, a request is made to votes_controller and the create or update action, depending on if the user had already submitted a vote on that record before. The params submitted would be the record_id as well as the value of the vote.
With Ajax, how should I handle the case where a user enters a page to vote without having voted on the record before? Specifically, the links would go to the votes#create in the beginning, but after that first submission, the links should switch to votes#update.
Is there a standard way to take care of this? I was thinking about just adding an extra check in the "create" method such that it would act like "update" if it found a record for the user_id, voteable_id pair, but this seemed kind of clumsy and not fully RESTful.
Thanks,
Eric
There are several techniques/patterns commonly used:
1) When your erb creates the page, you can supply a parameter to the JS script that is a part of the page. The parameter will be the "voting_url" it will be either votes/new or votes/123 depending on whether a create or update operation should be used.
2) You could use a "procedure call" as opposed to a rest call. The procedure/action would be "change_vote" -- with a param of 'up' which would be either true or false. The action would create the vote record if needed, or would otherwise modify it.
3) As part of the creation process of the main record, you could always create the vote_record. That way, the voting operations would always be updates since the vote_record will always already exist.
Added
Re: comment of when is it generally "acceptable" to move away from a rest call?
Rest is a design philosophy. It solves a lot of problems but doesn't fit all situations. I'd think that your original question would be ok but ultimately it is up to you and whomever reviews your architecture. Since it is possible to "bend" your app into a rest api for this function, some might tell you to do so--to thereby gain the benefit of not violating Restfulness.
Re: your example in your comment about friend relationships:
Since it makes sense to "create a friend relationship" it'd be better, other things being equal, to express the api as a rest "friendship object/create" call. It was exactly for your friending example that rest was created. -- The old style alternative is that each api developer had to figure out a large set of procedure names.
Rest provides a more consistent, standard way of creating the names.
Note that a "change_vote" procedure would be best defined as part of the votes object: either votes/change_vote or something similar. I believe that there is a "Rails way" for urls for rest procedures that don't fit the standard rest verbs.
Another idea would be yo change the url (through a helper probably) depending if the record is a new one.
Something like:
link_to_remote "Up", :url => voting_path(#vote)
module VotesHelper
def voting_path(vote)
if vote.new_record?
new_voting_path
else
edit_voting_path(vote)
end
end
end