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Atomicly update an embedded document with Doctrine MongoDB ODM

I had to deal with an unexpected problem recently. In my setup, I have a Conversation document which contains multiple Message documents embedded inside - a one-to-many mapping basically - and I need to atomically push a new Message when a user replies to a conversation. Below is the initial code that I implemented: public function reply($conversationId, Message $message, $flush = true) { $this->dm->createQueryBuilder($this->class) ->update() ->field('archivers')->unsetField() ->field('repliedBy')->set($message->getUserId()) ->field('repliedBody')->set($message->getBody()) ->field('repliedAt')->set(new \DateTime()) ->field('modifiedAt')->set(new \DateTime()) ->field('messages')->push($message) ->field('id')->equals(new \MongoId($conversationId)) ->getQuery() ->execut...

Updates to managed documents under Doctrine MongoDB ODM

If you update a document returned by Doctrine MongoDB ODM, changes to that document will be flushed to even if you do not call the persist() method on that document. That is because the document returned is a managed document. In fact, the persist() call gets ignored for these managed documents. From the documentation : If X is a preexisting managed document, it is ignored by the persist operation. However, the persist operation is cascaded to documents referenced by X, if the relationships from X to these other documents are mapped with cascade=PERSIST or cascade=ALL. In my case, this recently caused an issue where duplicate embedded documents ended up being pushed into a parent document because I was using and updating the parent document for generating a custom Symfony2 form. Turned out to be a bad idea... If you need to update these type of documents, detach them first.

Recent News and Articles - July 2012

Google announced the Google Compute Engine . Even though it is too early to comment, as a customer of Amazon's EC2 services, I am loving this; competition is definitely good news for business. For the gamers out there, Epic Games introduced the Unreal Engine 4 recently. Have a look at the Wired article to understand the implications of this new engine on the gaming and hardware industry. Here is the development walk-through . There is also a showcase demo available for a preview. Warning, shameless self promotion here: the Symfony Blog picked my article about creating a custom JMSSerializerBundle handler .

Creating a Custom JMSSerializerBundle Handler

A couple of days ago, I had to create a custom JMSSerializerBundle handler to process the serialization of a certain property of one of my models. In my case, I have a user model that has a single associated avatar stored on Amazon S3. The problem is that this avatar URI consists of just the path section (for example: /avatars/12/34/43/123443.jpg) instead of the full URL. This is required to allow my application to work with multiple buckets, each of which corresponds to a different environment such as development, production, etc. However, the Android client I am currently working on (or any other REST client for that matter) needs the full URL of each avatar returned from the server. Injecting this logic into the model class was obviously not a really good idea, so I decided to write a custom JMSSerializerBundle handler to achieve my objective. The idea is the have the custom handler access the required system services and transform the avatar path from a relative on to a full one...

Android Development

I have recently started developing a new application for the Android platform. It had been a while since I experimented with Android and this really manifested itself when I started this new project a couple of months ago. Having to deal with new Android features and corresponding backwards compatibility issues, I experienced a steep learning curve. This article highlights the lessons learned during this process. JDK Selection I have been a Linux user since 2001 and never looked back since then. So if you are developing on Linux, make sure to replace the default OpenJDK with Oracle's. This will save you a lot of headache dealing with peculiar errors and exceptions during the initial set-up process. Selecting an IDE I really like NetBeans and still develop with this IDE when it comes to PHP; it definitely feels much more intuitive than Eclipse. However, when it comes to Android development, it did not take long for me to realize I was fighting an uphill battle. With its excellen...

Setting up a Symfony2 REST service with FOSRestBundle

Installation First thing is to download and setup the FOSRestBundle. If you are running Symfony 2.0.x, get the FOSRestBundle version 0.6, otherwise, download the code in the master branch. The FOSRestBundle depends on the JMSSerializerBundle so the following instructions are going to include some extra information for setting up this bundle to complete our REST service. First thing is to install our dependencies. Add the following to your deps file: [metadata] git=http://github.com/schmittjoh/metadata.git version=1.1.0 [JMSSerializerBundle] git=git://github.com/schmittjoh/JMSSerializerBundle.git target=bundles/JMS/SerializerBundle [FOSRest] git=git://github.com/FriendsOfSymfony/FOSRest.git target=fos/FOS/Rest [FOSRestBundle] git=git://github.com/FriendsOfSymfony/FOSRestBundle.git target=bundles/FOS/RestBundle version=origin/0.6 Run the vendors script to install these bundles: php bin/vendors install Next, update your app/autoload.php file...

Securing Symfony2 REST services with FOSOAuthServerBundle

Overview In my previous article, I wrote about setting up a Symfony2 REST service using FOSRestBundle. However, this REST service was behind a firewall protected by a generic form_login provider. Not really ideal if you wish to open your REST API to other applications. So in this article, I will try to explain how to set up FOSOAuthServerBundle to protect your REST API methods using OAuth2. Before we start getting into the gritty details, it is a good idea to have a look at the official OAuth2 documentation . Let's begin... FOSOAuthServerBundle Installation You have to install v1.1.0 of FOSOAuthServerBundle if you are using Symfony 2.0.x. If not, see the docs . First, add the following entries to your deps file: [FOSOAuthServerBundle] git=git://github.com/FriendsOfSymfony/FOSOAuthServerBundle.git target=bundles/FOS/OAuthServerBundle version=origin/1.1.x [oauth2-php] git=git://github.com/FriendsOfSymfony/oauth2-php.git Run the vendors script to install these...