Rediscoverer

There is no better way to learn and master new tools than building something using them. So I decided to start building my version of the RealWorld App.

I will be building the front-end for now. The framework will be Vue 3 using the Composition API, Vue Router for routing (since it will be a single-page application), and Pinia for state management. I am also trying to learn Typescript, hence I will try to use much of it as I can in this project.

Edit: I totally forgot to give the link to my project’s github repo.

Wow! It has been almost five years since I wrote my latest blog post. The past few years were quite busy (with work and taking care of the new addition to our family), I wasn’t able to find time to add any posts. And whenever I did, I used it to rest rather than blog. My work also requires me to research, read, review and understand some medical concepts and standards so I can correctly apply and implement them in the system I have been working on.

It’s not that I’m not growing or learning anything. In fact, I have learned so much different stuff in the field that I might be able to switch to a medical career (just kidding). There are new web development related technologies and tools that I just want to try out. Who knows? I might be able to use it in our system and improve the dev process and/or performance.

So I made a list of the things I want to learn and use.

Docker
Already learned and currently using this for my local development. I had fun studying it and setting up my own docker environment for work. I have a long-term task of developing the process of updating some parts of our system. Using containers to sandbox and test the upgrade process is really nice. I can work on it and leave it running while I have different sets of containers I used for other tasks.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
I don’t have any plans on setting up any apps on AWS any time soon. I just want to know what kind of services they now provide and the possible ways I can use it in the future. The last time I used AWS was way back 2007 when my former boss asked me to checkout the Amazon S3 service and assess the potential uses of that service (which was relatively new back then). There are two free courses in Udemy from LinuxAcademy that tackles AWS basics and already finished the first course.

Javascript ES6 (ES2015)
Having been able to work with different javascript libraries like Prototype, MooTools, YUI and eventually jQuery) since 2006, creating and/or customizing plugins and having in-depth understanding on some of its concepts/behaviors such as prototypal inheritance, closures, hoisting and context (this) switching , I was pretty confident with my javascript skills. But I have been away from javascript for a few years, occasionally working on simple jQuery snippets. With the rise of server-side javascript (NodeJs) and modern javascript libraries/framework like React, Angular and Vue, javascript gets additionaly features and improvements. Now I feel that my javascript skills are dull and rusted. I need to work on that.

Typescript, Angular and the Ionic Framework
Except for working with responsive web designs using jQuery Mobile, I don’t have experience developing for mobile devices. Ionic Framework would enable me to build mobile apps without requiring me to learn platform-specific language for Android and IOS development. The drawback for me is that Ionic uses Angular whose primary language is Typescript. I guess it is okay to learn Typescript too since it might be handy if Deno matures, becomes a popular alternative to Nodejs. Deno (created by the person who also created NodeJS), is like a TypeScript version of NodeJS. There are parts of our system the function like a SPA (single page application), so Angular would be a good choice to use in case we decide to redo/update those parts (though I like Vuejs more than Angular).

Golang
I wanted to learn a new language and was originally considering Python. Then I came across the Go programming language and got intrigued by it features (fast-compilation, statically typed, built-in support for concurrency). There are times I’ve been working on problems that need to process large chunks of data, which I believe can be handled faster and more efficiently split into parts that are handled concurrently. Our system would probably be faster if we have microservices that handle processing of large data.

MongoDB
So that I know at least one NoSQL database as an alternative to MySQL.

NodeJS
Optional. I knew the server-side javascript will be a hit so I tried to study it as early as 2010.

got #nodejs setup and the chat demo running on my machine. Will try to allot an hour or two a day to play with it

— Rolan (@ditchx) March 14, 2010

My goodness. Eight years have past and I’m still newbie level with it. Most development tools and process nowadays involve something created with NodeJs and available through NPM.

That’s a full development stack!!! Imagine a mobile app built with Ionic that communicates to a server made using Golang pushing/pulling to and from MongoDB, inside Docker container(s) deployed using AWS.

In CakePHP v1.3 (and probably earlier), you need to work a little more to correctly paginate queries that use GROUP BY clause. This is because Model::find(‘count’) doesn’t get the record count right when with that. The most common solution I found online to get the correct count was to add a paginateCount() method on the model and use Model::getAffectedRows(), like what was done in this article: http://wiltonsoftware.com/posts/view/custom-group-by-pagination-and-a-calculated-field.

Pagination was fine until I encountered a case where the solution did not seem to work. I traced the problem down to the wrong count given by Model::getAffectedRows(). Digging inside CakePHP’s Model source reminded me that Model::afterFind() callbacks (including those provided by any Behaviors attached to the model) are also executed. If there was at least one callback that queried the db, calling Model::getAffectedRows() after a Model::find(‘count’) would give a different result.

To workaround this, I had to disable callbacks before doing the count:

==

	
function paginateCount($conditions = null, $recursive = 0, $extra = array()) {
    $parameters = compact('conditions');
    $this->recursive = $recursive;
		
    if ( isset($extra['group']) ) {
        $extra['callbacks'] = false; // Disable callbacks
        $count = $this->find('count', array_merge($parameters, $extra));
        $count = $this->getAffectedRows();
    } else {
        $count = $this->find('count', array_merge($parameters, $extra));
    }

    return $count;
}

==

The solution varies depending on the callbacks: how they affect the number of records Model::find(‘count’) returns and/or if the make any queries to the database that can change the count from Model::getAffectedRows(). One might have to detach some behaviors and leave others to run their afterFind() callback, or manually do the callback after the call to Mode::getAffectedRows() has been made. In my case, I can simply disable all callbacks.

At work, I encountered a scenario where we needed to paginate a model over different sets of conditions. Multiple calls to $this->paginate() on the controller somewhat works, but the problem is generating the pagination links and determining which set of conditions is being paginated.

Let’s say, I have a Post belongsTo Category model relationship. I want to paginate post by Category in the same page.

Somewhere in the controller, I might have something like:

==

	
$phpCategoryPosts = $this->paginate('Post', array('Post.category_id' => 1));
$jsCategoryPosts = $this->paginate('Post', array('Post.category_id' => 2));

==

Then, to generate pagination links in the view, I might do something like:

==

// For PHP posts
if($this->Paginator->hasNext('Post')) {
    echo $this->Paginator->next('Next', array('model' => 'Post')); 
}
	
// For Javascript posts
if($this->Paginator->hasNext('Post')) {
    echo $this->Paginator->next('Next', array('model' => 'Post')); 
}

==

The paginator will just use the info from the most recent call to paginate() for that model in the controller. So if there are no PHP posts while there are 10 Javascript posts with 5 items per page, both PHP and Javascript posts will have a “Next” button. So how can CakePHP tell which is which?

My solution was to generate (on the fly) different models that I can use to paginate:

==

eval('class PhpPost extends Post {}');		
eval('class JavascriptPost extends Post {}');		
$this->loadModel('PhpPost');
$this->loadModel('JavascriptPost');
$phpCategoryPosts = $this->paginate('PhpPost', array('Post.category_id' => 1));
$jsCategoryPosts = $this->paginate('JavascriptPost', array('Post.category_id' => 2));

==

And in the view, just specify the which model to use:

==

// For PHP posts
if($this->Paginator->hasNext('PhpPost')) {
    echo $this->Paginator->next('Next', array('model' => 'PhpPost')); 
}
	
// For Javascript posts
if($this->Paginator->hasNext('JavascriptPost')) {
    echo $this->Paginator->next('Next', array('model' => 'JavascriptPost')); 
}

==

Hello there my little blog. It’s been a quite a while since I used you. The projects/work I had for the couple of months really got my attention and interest. There were many times that I wanted to blog about some stuff I encounter in a project. But even before I am able write, I already find myself working at another project.

I was finally able to get a VPS to put you on. DigitalOcean’s plan is really affordable and its features were comparable to other top VPS providers. Setup was a breeze because of their guide/tutorials, but had to rebuild several times (remind me to finish a working setup first before making my OWN customized settings). Do you like your new home? Hopefully, you’ll no longer be alone – I can now put up other apps/stuff I’m working on the needs server tweaking that can’t be done with shared hosting.

We also just moved to a new home, too. All of my work and efforts for the couple of years have paid off. But there still lot things to do and fix, I still may not be able to see you often.

I’m currently using DOMPDF to convert an HTML page to PDF. The generated PDFs are fine, except that some styles doesn’t seem to get applied and some images ended up missing. After setting $_dompdf_show_warnings to true to debug the process, I found out that relative paths with leading slashes are interpreted as absolute file paths in the local file system. For example, if my document root is at /var/www/html/ and the relative path of the stylesheet (in the html markup) is /css , DOMPDF interprets it as /css instead of /var/www/html/css. The same happens with the case of images.

The application is created with the Yii Framework and uses pretty urls (the usual stuff you see), so it will be almost impossible to use paths relative to the current directory (../). I needed to them to point relative to the top level (/), keeping the leading slashes.

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One of the projects I’m currently handling was built using CodeIgniter and uses Ben Edmunds Ion Auth for user authentication. I gave another programmer instructions on how to implement a controller-action based access control list (similar to one of CakePHP’s ACL implementation). Though not exactly done according to my specs and required some fixes/enhancements, it was fit for consumption 🙂 .

While fixing/debugging the implementation, I had to whip up some function to list all available controllers and actions saving them into the appropriate tables required by the ACL system along with default permissions. I think I requested this feature when I gave out the instructions (no body would want to manually browser and enter all those actions).

Though the administration panel for setting controller-action permissions was easy to use, the client wanted the names of the actions more descriptive so the users have a clear idea on that an action does. The names were the actual action (method) name and should be left untouched, though. Some action names are self-explanatory (edit, send_mail, etc) but it does help if the user can get more info about it. Incidentally, a description field is provided but it is left empty for manual input. Now, the challenge was to find a way to eliminate manual entry of descriptions for each action.

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You can easily include and use models inside cake shells/tasks as you would normally do inside a controller – via the $uses class attribute. But the cake shell doesn’t give you the same functionality for loading components. So how do you load and use them inside shells/tasks?

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The jQuery Validation Plugin, by default, provides a way to validate fields using server-side resource via Ajax call. This is through the use of the remote rule/method.

According to the documentation (or from how I understand the stuff written about it), the script response is evaluated as a JSON. Returning true implies that the field passed validation while return values such a false, undefined or null would mean it failed. The documentation also seemed to mean that I can return a string that will be used and displayed as its error message. Good, I’m running several server side validations on a particular field. It’s best that I display the details on which validation check that field failed.

My script did return a string but it wasn’t being used by the validation plugin – no error messages are being displayed. I knew, though, that validation failed since the form did not continue to submit. The PHP snippet kinda looked like this:
==

jQuery.parseJSON() utility function. Reading the documentation for that function gave me a clue on what I was doing wrong. Echoing ‘true’ resulted to true and echoing ‘false’ resulted to false – as if the string was eval()ed. If I were to eval() ‘some string’, it would give me an error. But if I eval() ‘”some string”‘ (note the double quotes) instead, it evaluates as a string.

So, in order for my message to be parsed as string, I just wrap the output inside double quotes:
==

http://json.org/).

A user from PHP User Group Philippines posted a question on the forum asking how to prevent the jQuery Datepicker dialog from closing upon selection of a date. The date picker had the button panel enabled where clicking “Done” closes the dialog. It seems that the Datepicker plugin didn’t have a readily available way of enforcing the behavior.

Other users posted solutions – all making use of the onSelect callback. I tried to solve it too using the onSelect callback, but to no avail. I even tried to fool the datepicker to make it think that it was configured to be displayed inline (calling it on div instead of an input element makes it inline – always visible) but didn’t work (even if it did, I wouldn’t advice it since it is ugly). A solution from another user seemed to work but it was gave an error.
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