You can download the script here and there’s a demo here.

Simple, I thought, just use one of the many existing drop-down plugins. I tried many, but most seemed to use hardcoded styles and I had a few problems (some of which I encountered again, writing this).

So I’ve made this, I think it’s fairly robust, but I’m sure there’ll be problems with embedded objects (flash) and select boxes (in <= IE6), but for my needs, it sufficed, so I thought I'd share, in case anyone else needs a simple script to manage drop-downs.

To use, create a nest of elements like this:

<ul id="top">
  <li>
    <ul>
      <li></li>
    </ul>
  </li>
</ul>

or something similar (any elements, should work) and call:

// jQuery:
$('ul#top').dropdownify();
 
// mootools
$('top').dropdownify();

Which should create a simple drop-down.

There are a couple of examples, one for jQuery and one for mootools, and the files can downloaded here and here.

I did encounter a problem with IE, mainly due to z-index faults, so with HTML code like the following:

<div class="nav-wrapper">
  <ul id="top">
    <li>
      <ul>
        <li></li>
      </ul>
    </li>
  </ul>
</div>

I used the following CSS:

div.nav-wrapper,
div.nav-wrapper ul,
div.nav-wrapper ul li {
  position: static;
  z-index: 100;
}

class CounterComponent extends Component {
  var $components = array(
    'Session'
  );
 
  function i() {
    if ($this->Session->check('Counter.i')) {
      $i = ($this->Session->read('Counter.i') + 1);
 
    } else {
      $i = 0;
    }
 
    $this->Session->write('Counter.i', $i);
 
    return $i;
  }
 
  function clear() {
    $this->Session->delete('Counter.i');
  }
}

It simply kept track of a number over the life of the current session and incremented it each time it was accessed. I did’t think it would interfere in my other controllers, and it didn’t until I tried to perform a simple redirect later on in the app:

  function edit($id) {
    if (!empty($this->data)) {
      // process it
      $this->Customer->id = $id;
 
      $this->Customer->save($this->data);
 
      $this->redirect(array(
        'controller' => 'customers',
        'action' => 'view',
        $id
      ));
 
    } else {
      $this->data = $this->Customer->find('first', array(
        'id' => $id
      ));
 
      extract($this->data);
    }
 
    $this->set(get_defined_vars());
 
    $this->render('form');
  }

That code seemed simple enough, but each and every time it was run, I’d be sent to /customers/edit, instead of /customers/view/1.

WTF? Cake is losing my ids?

So I tried changing the redirect to a string:

      $this->redirect('/customers/view/'.$id);

No difference, still redirects to /customers/edit. Ok fine. Lets try a full URL:

      $this->redirect('http://www.google.co.uk/');

Serisouly. Still? All this happened over a series of a couple of days, each session of codingbanging my head against a brick wall leaving me more frustrated. I got mad I created a TestsController with an action test which exhibited the same behaviour… (But only after I’d moved everything into the AppController, whilst franticly trying everything… *sigh*)

After many visits to the CakePHP documentation I decided to re-investigate the source code and see if I had missed anything. The Controller::redirect() function contains this code:

		$response = $this->Component->beforeRedirect($this, $url, $status, $exit);
 
		if ($response === false) {
			return;
		}
		if (is_array($response)) {
			foreach ($response as $resp) {
				if (is_array($resp) && isset($resp['url'])) {
					extract($resp, EXTR_OVERWRITE);
				} elseif ($resp !== null) {
					$url = $resp;
				}
			}
		}

“But that’s fine!”, I thought, “I don’t even have a beforeRedirect() function in my component, and surely the class I’m extending will just return null.” Oh dear. Assumption. There it is, done now.

// Component::beforeRedirect
	function beforeRedirect(&$controller, $url, $status = null, $exit = true) {
		$response = array();
 
		foreach ($this->_primary as $name) {
			$component =& $this->_loaded[$name];
 
			if ($component->enabled === true && method_exists($component, 'beforeRedirect')) {
				$resp = $component->beforeRedirect($controller, $url, $status, $exit);
				if ($resp === false) {
					return false;
				}
				$response[] = $resp;
			}
		}
		return $response;
	}

Crap. It returns an empty array, which the redirect() function will use because it isn’t null, which will redirect to the current controller/action but strip out the id.

Lesson: Always, ALWAYS, create a base component to extend, or, alternatively, just read the fricking manual properly.

TL;DR: I failed at creating a CakePHP component. Fix: class MyComponent extends Object {} instead of class MyComponent extends Component {}.

The primary reason for the update is to add a new ‘non-CSS’ property of ‘include’. This property allows you to include styles that have already been defined in the current class.

For example, if you had a stylesheet that looked like this:

.bold {
  font-weight: bold;
}
 
.important {
  font-weight: bold;
}

You could rewrite this using:

JSS({
  ".bold": {
    "font-weight": "bold"
  },
  ".important": {
    "include": ".bold"
  }
});

Which I know you shouldn’t really do, and yes, it probably does go against the whole point of CSS, but I’m sure it’ll be useful in some situation at some point… No? Well it was interesting making it anyway.

Other minor updates are a PHP version so you can write nested stylesheets and output minified CSS all server-side and a bunch of HTML colour names that are actually shorter than the 6 digit hex codes.

I might work on doing other languages if I fancy the practice… Probably make a CSS to JSS conversion script first though…

You can see the updated demo page here, or just download the files here and have a look for yourself.

It’s pretty simple so far, and is only a few hundred KB, but I think it’s got some cool features, and maybe even potential.

Like the other stuff it’s under a Creative-Commons SA license and can be found at:

http://mod-framework.googlecode.com/.

Any opinions, suggestions, contributions would be gratefully received.

Current functionality:

Model-View-Controller system
MySQL support (using a modified version of the DB class from earlier)
script/server implementation in PHP
Helper association, so if you create a PageHelper class for your Pages controller all the functions will automatically be made ‘global’ (accessible view functionname() instead of Helper::functionname())
Includes mootools in the htdocs folder

The DB doesn’t work quite how I would have imagined it to (well, with PHP 5.3 it might… but I haven’t got it yet…) so currently any models are added to $GLOBALS[] so that for a Page model, $GLOBALS['Page']->find_by_name(‘dom’), etc would work.

There’s probably some other stuff in there too…

I recently had to set up a cron to backup all MySQL databases but I didn’t want them in one huge file.

So I’ve written a little script, that is probably not entirely efficient, but serves it’s purpose for us:

#!/bin/bash
 
# get todays date
DATE=`date +"%F"`;
 
# go to the backup directory
cd /var/backup/mysql
 
# export the databases, each to it's own file
#
# the first echo is sent to mysql, so we're basically echoing SHOW DATABASES; to mysql
# then we're chopping off the first line (sed 1d) and passing the remaining input to
# xargs which accepts \n or space delimited arguments as a list and echo's out the
# string mysqldump -u <username> -p<password> % > %.sql (replacing % with the name) to
# /bin/bash
#
echo "SHOW DATABASES;" | mysql -u <username> -p<password> | sed 1d | xargs --replace=% echo "mysqldump -u <username> -p<password> % > %.sql" | /bin/bash
 
# compress the backups
tar czf mysql_backup_$DATE.tar.gz *.sql
 
# remove the large .sql files
rm *.sql

This was tested on a SuSE 11 server, might need some tweaking on other dists.

• Confirmation – Provides an Ok, Cancel input box before proceeding further
• Submit Button – Disable and change the text on a submit button
• Information Div – Display a div that lets the user know something is happening
• Undo – Undo the changes (re-enable a previously disabled submit button, change the information div) that have been carried out by the class
• AJAX – Submit the form using AJAX instead of the ‘old fashioned’ way

All these should be easily implemented using the class.

Examples are provided in examples.html.

As previously, this work is released under the creative commons share alike license.

Download submitEvents 0.1 (31.9k) (Includes mootools 1.2)

Edit: I really do dislike internet exploder… The above version failed in IE6 (mootools’ form.toQueryString() function). I’ve updated the code to 0.11 which can be found here:

submitEvents 0.11 (32.8k) (Includes mootools 1.2)

Edit 2: Ok, so my hatred for IE, although deserved, was unnecessary in this situation…

I’ve updated the code to use mootools .bind(this) on the ajax onComplete function, this fixed the main problem with IE6 and makes the code look much cleaner. Also the examples file is now PHP instead of static HTML and returns a var_dump of $_POST when the form is submitted.

PS. This will be the final update to this post!

submitEvents 0.2 (32.3k) (Includes mootools 1.2)

It’s a lightweight Database wrapper with functions similar to Ruby on Rails’ ActiveRecord.

When I discovered the __call() method I wanted to make my own version in PHP, so here it is!

It supports most basic functions, all based on the MySQL set of PHP functions, no other wrapper is required (PEAR etc.). There is not (yet?) any automatic mysql_real_escape_string or anything, although that could easily be added if required, my assumption is you’ve done that kind of thing already before passing anything to it.

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$db = new DB('mysql://username:password@server:port/database');
$people = $db->table('people');
$companies = $db->table('companies');
 
$company = $company->find_by_name_like('%test%');
 
$person = $people->create(
  array(
    'name' => 'Dom',
    'company_id' => $company->id,
    'created_date' => date('Y-m-d H:i:s')
  )
);
 
$id = $people->lastId();
$dom = $people->find($id);
 
print $person->name;
// Dom
 
print $dom->name;
// Dom
 
$dom = $person;
$new_users = $person->find_by_created_date_before(date('Y-m-d H:i:s', strtotime('1 hour ago')));
 
foreach ($new_users as $user) {
  // loop through all the users with a create date more than 1 hour ago
  if (!$company->find($user->company_id)) {
    // and delete any that don't have a company associated with them
    $people->delete($user->id);
  }
}

It’s only a first draft, so any comments, questions or pointing out any typo’s in the code, (yeah, there are likely to be a few…) would be muchly appreciated.

This work is free under the Creative Commons Share Alike 2.0 license.

Download:

DB_0.1.tar.gz (4.84Kb)

Edit: Think next on my list is TextMate syntax highlighting and maybe the non-default template…