How to ask questions the smart way

Found this absolutely fantastic article on how to ask questions on forums, newsgroups etc. in an intelligent and considered way that is more likely to get you a decent response.

Very good advice... http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Quick and easy server control

I use a macports installation of Apache2, PHP5 and MySQl5 for development on my macbooks. This is a great system and really simplifies the installation and setup the utilities.

However, the start/stop commands for each are not added to the PATH by default and it's tough remembering the long paths to the control programs.

But there's a solution:

1. Open the Terminal
2. Make sure that you're in your home folder.
3. Edit (or create) .bash_profile
   
   
   

   $ nano .bash_profile

4. Add aliases for your commands
   
   
   

   alias apache2ctl="sudo /opt/local/apache/bin/apachectl"
   alias mysqlstart="sudo /opt/local/bin/mysqld_safe5"
   alias mysqlstop="sudo /opt/local/bin/mysqladmin5 -u root -p shutdown"

5. restart your bash session with
   
   
   

   source ~/.bash_profile

   and you're good to go...

Then you simply issue the following commands from the command line.

apache2ctl start # Start Apache
apache2ctl stop # Stop Apache
apache2ctl graceful # Restart Apache
mysqlstart # Start Mysql
mysqlstop # Stop Mysql

Custom Validators and messages

Only a quick one now but there's a couple of points here that are worth noting. Especially as I've just been going round in circles for 30 minutes trying to get my custom message to display when a Doctrine form field was empty.

To be fair, I'm not confident it was due to it being a Doctrine field but anyway...

so...

1. If you use the 'addMessage()' method to add a custom method for an error code that is part of the default messages array within the validator base it WON'T get overwritten!!! If a default message exists it will always take precedence over the new version....

2. It's also worth remembering that the sfValidatorError (that your validator should extend from) class has it's clean() method called and this, in turn, calls the doClean() method. During the clean() method however, the isEmpty() method is called if the 'required' option is set to true. If the isEmpty() method returns true then your doClean() method won't ever be called... The way to get around this is to do one of the following:
a) set the 'required' option to false... not ideal if your value is required.
b) override the isEmpty() method to always return false and allow your doClean code to be called.

Done & Done