I’ve adapted my ZFKit for an upcoming Twilio presentation (codestock next weekend!) and created a new project on github for it under the project name ‘twiliokit‘.  ZFKit was updated a little bit (a basic menu/navigation was added with Zend_Navigation, some example unit tests added) and used as the basis for this.

You can see this in action if you want to play around with it a bit.

I’ve modified the twilio REST client available from Twilio.com.  While functional, it wasn’t the easiest thing to use, and I’ve added a couple helper methods which may make things a bit easier for people.

I’ve got two examples so far – one is a basic ‘send SMS message to a phone’ controller, which uses my new helper methods in the Twilio_Rest_Client library.  The second is a small guessing game which demonstrates making use of ZF sessions.  You enter a phone number (and name!) to call, and the app will call up and ask the person to add two numbers together (“hello dave.  What is 4 + 2?”)  Based on your answer provided, you’re told whether you were correct or not, then offered a chance to play again.

I should have a few more examples before next weekend, but there’s actually quite a bit going on, between the ZF code and the Twilio code.  I’m working on something (in the code now) which will log all the call activity, and I’m working on it logging everything to a Doctrine table.

When you first use twiliokit, you’ll need to enter the ‘scripts’ directory and run the ./run script.  This will create the necessary ‘tcall’ table to store the info.  This is building from a schema.yml file to a local sqlite file.  You will probably need to chmod 777 the dev.db sqlite file, depending on your system’s permissions.

Oh, and there are a couple unit tests in place in the ./tests directory (though certainly not comprehensive).

This is definitely a work in progress, but I wanted to share it on github to allow people to use it and make any changes they need and be able to easily send those changes back to me.  I was on the fence about making this just a working branch on the zfkit project, but it felt like that might get too confusing.

Let me know what you think!

I’m putting together a basic Zend Framework starter kit.  Right now I’ve got basic Doctrine 1.2 integration with predefined directories for schema, models, etc.  Also an init process to allow for automatic injection of specified objects on to front controllers (think $this->session available in your controllers, for example).

Any interest in getting a copy of this?  What other things would you like to see preconfigured or preintegrated in a starter kit?

I’m reinvestigating Doctrine and Zend Framework for a new project.  I’d dismissed them last year as not meeting my needs, but am giving it another go this year.  I have to say I’ve got mixed impressions at best, as there seems to be little in the way of documentation with real use cases.

I would have expected there to be some explicit reference to how to set this up, but the best I can find are general examples where the Doctrine models directories are appended to the include_path in a ZF index file.  Shouldn’t there be a way to explicitly have the Doctrine subsystem react to requests for models as well?

I was expecting the Doctrine::autoload to look for the classes on the ‘models path’ set via Doctrine::setModelsDirectory() call, but it doesn’t.

Hrm… after more investigation, it seems there’s a ‘modelsAutoload’ method on the Doctrine_core which will automatically look at the models_path set via setModelsDirectory().  Almost what I need.  Except…(!)

There’s no support for multiple directories.  The standard Doctrine generation process creates a ‘BaseFoo’ object in a ‘generated’ directory below where the standard ‘Foo’ file is written.  The ‘Foo’ file subclasses the BaseFoo, but there’s no support to have it autoloaded.

In my ‘_initDoctrine()’ in Bootstrap, I’ve got

$autoloader = Zend_Loader_Autoloader::getInstance();
$autoloader->pushAutoloader(array('Doctrine','modelsAutoload'));

I know what to do here! I thought to myself. I’ll subclass Doctrine’s Core (which is what’s referenced by the ‘Doctrine’ above) and have that be the autoloader to use.  I’ll modify the modelsAutoload() method to deal with an array of $_modelsDirectory entries, and attempt to load from each of them.  Except…(!)

$_modelsDirectory is *private*.  I can’t modify it in a subclass, nor is there a get() method on the Core class to access it.  There’s a *set* method (setModelsDirectory()) but no get!  So, I’m rather forced to go through modifying the Doctrine Core to get the behaviour I want, in the simplest form.  I’ve been trying to followup on some other postings about getting autoload to work with Doctrine-generated models, but they seem incomplete (to me anyway) or suggest to modify how Doctrine generates its class names (doesn’t seem simple or straightforward to me at all).  Having Doctrine core be able to deal with an array of paths to check for models would be the simplest, especially given that Doctrine *forces* this issue on you by generating classes in different directories by default.

Crux of the code is:

Doctrine/Core.php line 1142

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if(is_array(self::$_modelsDirectory)) {
 foreach(self::$_modelsDirectory as $dir) {
  $class = $dir . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . str_replace('_', DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR, $className) . '.php';
  if (file_exists($class)) {
   require $class;
   return true;
  }
 }
} else {
 $class = self::$_modelsDirectory . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . str_replace('_', DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR, $className) . '.php';
 if (file_exists($class)) {
  require $class;
  return true;
 }
}

I don’t see Doctrine code on github – if it’s there I’ll fork it and create my own patched version for a pull.

So now in my code, I can say

Doctrine::setModelsDirectory(array("/app/doctrine/models/","/app/doctrine/models/generated/"));

FWIW, I can’t find the equivalent code section in Doctrine 2.0, though I suspect this might still be a design issue in 2.0 (would love to be proved wrong on that).

How have *you* dealt with autoloading of Doctrine-generated classes in ZF (or indeed, in general)?