Mirmo Dynamics - Tag - handy

Passing arbitrary parameters to a route in symfony

Geoffrey — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 21:12:00 +0100

Parameters are an important parts of routes in symfony, and in any other routing framework for that matter, and everyone knows how to add mandatory or optional parameters to a route. But did you know you can also silently pass arbitrary parameters to a route from the routing definitions ? This may not be a very clear description, so let's take an example. Say you have a tabbed navigation system, and you want to know in your template which tab is the current one. In a perfect world, you could assume one tab corresponds to a module and check this module, but let's say that one tab can contain multiples modules. How are you doing now ? Quite simply actually, by passing a tab parameter to your route.

foo_route:
  url:       /foo
  param: { tab: foobar }

bar_route:
  url:       /bar
  param: { tab: foobar }

Now you can access the tab parameter in your layout:

<?php $currentTab = $sf_params->get('tab'); ?>

Easy heh ? Of course this kind of parameters is not limited to tell which tab we're currently in, you can, for example, bypass the limitation of a system that requires a particular file to be in a particular location (not that using mod_rewrite would not be more efficient, I just wanted one more example):

foobar_xml:
  url:       /a/stupid/url/that/you/cant/change/foobar.xml
  param: { module: default, action: static, file: "/assets/foobar.xml", mimetype: "text/xml" }

Here we simply pass the file and mimetype parameters to an action that'll take care to serve the right file.

Handy ! But please note that you can't pass such parameters in sfPropelRouteCollection for now (yup, this a bug, and there's a ticket already).

Mass vim file opening reloaded

Geoffrey — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 21:20:00 +0200

Thinking about it, the snippet I posted earlier was a bit silly as vim can open by itself multiple files way more efficiently. The only benefit from my script is that I don't have to type the --servername and --remote-silent-tab.

So let's add some usefulness ! First, when I need this script, it's often that I first grepped the files, and then decide that I want to edit them all. From this point of view, having to pass them as arguments is not that handy, so we'll add a way to pass them via STDIN.

Also, what if I want to send them to another vim server ? We'll add this ability too.

Here is the resulting script:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# set a default SERVERNAME
SERVERNAME="ash0"

# look for files on stdin
if ! [ -t 0 ]; then
  FILES=`cat /dev/stdin`
else
  exit;
fi;

# now let's check if we want a specific vim server
if ! [ -z $1 ]; then
  SERVERNAME=$1
fi;

# we can now open the files
/usr/bin/gvim --servername $SERVERNAME --remote-silent-tab $FILES

Tada !

You can now do the followings:

grep foo | sendtovim
grep foo | sendtovim grep0

Mass vim file opening

Geoffrey — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 19:40:00 +0200

Remember my old post about vim and rox-filer ? Well I've got one tiny and silly addition to it now, I can mass open files from any shell command line, with this little script placed in my ~/bin/ (don't forget to chmod +x):

for i in $*; do
  /usr/bin/gvim --servername ash0 --remote-silent-tab $i
  sleep 1
done;

The sleep 1 is necessary as vim does not seem to like being flooded with files.

Example usage:

sendtovim `grep foo *`

Opens in vim all files containing "foo" in the current directory. Who said handy ?

Note: I know have an updated and useful version of this script

Rename directories to lowercase

Geoffrey — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:35:00 +0200

Using a single (and somewhat simple) shell line, you can rename any directory to its lowercase version.

for i in *; do lcase=`echo $i | tr A-Z a-z`; if [ ! -d $lcase ]; then mv $i $lcase; fi; done;

Viva el chell !