Rewriting OpenBenches in Symfony

The Open Benches logo.

I once described my ideal coding environment to a colleague as "telneting directly into prod and damn the consequences!" I jest. But only a little. When I build for myself I treat best practices and coding styles as harmful. Chaotic evil but, hey, it's only myself I'm hurting. Anyway, my wife and I run a […]

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Getting Auth0 user information on non-firewall Symfony pages

Logo of the Symfony project.

I am using Auth0's Symfony library to allow users to log in with their social network providers. It works really well. Using this firewall configuration, a user who visits /private is successfully taken through the login flow and I can then use $this->getUser() to see their details. security: password_hashers: Symfony\Component\Security\Core\User\PasswordAuthenticatedUserInterface: 'auto' providers: users_in_memory: { memory: […]

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Doctrine - difference between bindValue() and setParameter() on prepared statements

Doctrine project logo.

This pissed me off and I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong. So I'm blogging about my ignorance. Imagine you're using Symfony and Doctrine to access a database. You are using prepared statements to prevent any SQL injection problems. There are two main ways of doing this - and they disagree about how […]

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Symfony - multiple paths to the same route within a controller

Logo of the Symfony project.

I couldn't work out how to use Route Aliasing within my controller. I couldn't find anything in the documentation about it. But, thanks to a StackOverflow comment it is possible. Suppose you want users to be able to access a page using /users/123 and /people/123 - with both routes displaying the same data? Normally you'd […]

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Fixing a weird issue with Symfony's Cache

Logo of the Symfony project.

I'm just getting started with Symfony, so I'm blogging some of the weird things I'm finding. Symfony has a concept of Cache Contracts. You can call an expensive / slow / intensive operation and immediately cache the result for a specific time period. Next time you call the operation, the results are served from the […]

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Doctrine - how to use LIKE with dbal prepared statements

Logo of the Symfony project.

I'm just getting started with Symfony, so I'm blogging some of the weird things I'm finding. I want to use Doctrine dbal to search a database for a partial match. For example searching for "smith" should find "blacksmith" and "smithy". I have a prepared statement like this: $queryBuilder = $conn->createQueryBuilder(); $queryBuilder ->select("whatever") ->from("table") ->where("name LIKE […]

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