Geert Van Damme

When storing entity objects in the http session, you might run into following exception :

ErrorException: Notice: serialize() [function.serialize]: “id” returned as member variable from __sleep() but does not exist in…

Now, apparently php has some problems serializing an object which subclasses an object with private properties. As Doctrine always creates subclasses of your entity classes (which are called Proxy classes), this means you should never use private properties (e.g. $id or any other property) on your entity (or associated entities) ! Use protected instead.

Symfony2 contains a lot of validators out of the box, but it is not very clearly documented how to use custom messages when validation fails for these standard validators. After some investigation, I found the validation messages in Symfony/vendor/symfony/src/Symfony/Bundle/FrameworkBundle/Resources/translations/. It is very easy to override a message. Just look up the message you wish to modify (e.g. ‘This value should not be blank’), create your own validators.[language].yml file (or .xliff if you prefer) in your bundle, and add this message as a key with your custom message as value :

# validators.en.yml

This value should not be blank: This is a required field

That’s all

I recently needed to use the Zend GData component in my Symfony2 project. It is very easy to setup, but there is one mistake that I suspect some other people might make as well.

First, add the Zend library to your vendor folder (e.g. vendor/Zend/library/Zend). As Zend does not use namespaces, you need to register the ‘Zend’ prefix instead. This can be done in the autoload.php file located in your app folder. Apparently Zend has some problems this way with ‘require_once’ statements, hence the modification of the include path (last line) :

// autoload.php

use Symfony\Component\ClassLoader\UniversalClassLoader;

// ... existing code

$loader->registerPrefixes(array(
    'Twig_Extensions_' => __DIR__.'/../vendor/twig-extensions/lib',
    'Twig_'            => __DIR__.'/../vendor/twig/lib',
    'Swift_'           => __DIR__.'/../vendor/swiftmailer/lib/classes',
    'Zend_'           => __DIR__.'/../vendor/Zend/library',
));

$loader->register();
$loader->registerPrefixFallback(array(
    __DIR__.'/../vendor/symfony/src/Symfony/Component/Locale/Resources/stubs',
));
set_include_path(__DIR__.'/../vendor/Zend/library'.PATH_SEPARATOR.get_include_path());

Now you are ready to use the Zend components. One mistake I made, I used the classes without a leading backslash, which does not work because the classes are in de default namespace. So, instead of using e.g.

$gdataCal = new Zend_Gdata_Calendar($client); // class not found error will be thrown

you need to add a backslash as such :

$gdataCal = new \Zend_Gdata_Calendar($client); // class is located in default namespace

The Symfony2 book says that validation using annotations should be done as follows :

// Acme/BlogBundle/Author.php
use Symfony\Component\Validator\Constraints as Assert;

class Author
{
    /**
     * @Assert\NotBlank()
     */
    public $name;
}

I tried this on my installation, but this doesn’t work. I had to change ‘@Assert\’ into ‘@assert:’ to make it work :

// Acme/BlogBundle/Author.php

class Author
{
    /**
     * @assert:NotBlank()
     */
    public $name;
}

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