Category Archives: Development

asp.net C# Url.Action with routevalues

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Using routevales you can change area and/or pass parameters on to the link you wish to hit.

//"normal" Url.Action - creates a link in the area where it is called from (and don't pass any values along)
<a href="@Url.Action("action", "controller")" class="myCssClass">link text</a>
//Url.Action with a that links to another area (area name or empty for the default area); also sets the category to shoes and it passes along the id that this view has.
<a href="@Url.Action("action", "controller", new { Area = "", id = Model.id, category="shoes"})" class="myCssClass">link text</a>

MVC3 Getting the URI in a controller

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If there is a need to get the URI that the was used to reach the controller then the Request holds that information and it can be retrieved to a URI object

public ActionResult MyAction()
{
    var uri = Request.Url;
    var port = uri.Port;
    var absoluteUri = uri.AbsoluteUri
 
    //... do things here
 
    return View();    
}

PHP Send a mail as UTF-8

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To send a mail from PHP encoded as UTF-8 is fairly easy to do by modifying the headers.

//Sender with special chars (UTF-8) encoded
mail('mail@example.com', '=?UTF-8?B?'.base64_encode($subjectString).'?=', $messageString, "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\nContent-type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\r\n");
//Sender not UTF-8 encoded
mail('mail@example.com', 'sender@mail.com', $messageString, "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\nContent-type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\r\n");

Installing PHPUnit on ubuntu

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The installation package that can be installed from apt includes a console tool to run PHPUnits, but is (currently) not the latest version. One way to get past this is to install PHPUnit from apt and then upgrade PHPUnit via PEAR note: (currently) PEAR needs to be updated as well.

user@devserver~: sudo apt-get install phpunit
user@devserver~: sudo pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de
user@devserver~: sudo pear channel-discover components.ez.no
user@devserver~: sudo pear channel-discover pear.symfony-project.com
user@devserver~: sudo pear update
user@devserver~: sudo pear update phpunit/PHPUnit

The line that simply says “sudo pear update” should use updates per to the latest version. Also as the commenter says “upgrade” might be the right keyword to us for some versions.

PHP showing the name of the current file

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Sometimes there is a need to show the name of the current file.
Using $_SERVER[‘PHP_SELF’] will only show the file that is executed (not the a included file)
Using __FILE__ gives the current file (with a full path)

For this example running.php is accessed in the browser/cli.

//included.php
<?php
echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; //will show running.php
echo __FILE__; //will show included.php
?>
//running.php
<?php
INCLUDE('included.php')
?>

SimpleXml save formated output

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When using the SimpleXml->asXML(‘file.xml’) the output is simply written onto one line.
like

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<product><companyId>1</companyId><productId>1:1</productId></product>

There is nothing wrong with this but if you add line breaks and indentations the xml file looks better and is easier to (manually) read.
Unfortunately there is no way to do this using SimpleXML, but there is a quick and dirty way to do this; and that is to import the SimpleXMLobject to a DOMElement and do it there so some example code

$xmlDom = dom_import_simplexml($simpleXmlObject);
$xmlDom->formatOutput = true;
$xmlDom->save("test.xml");

This would result in an xml file looking like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<product>
	<companyId>1</companyId>
	<productId>1:1</productId>
</product>

Easier to read but takes some extra space on the disk (might not be much but it is good to remember).

Internet Explorer not rendering empty div correctly

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Internet Explorer won’t render empty divs correctly.

I had a div with a height and a background image but no content; It was not rendered with the correct height it was only like one line.

A work around for this is to have some “content” inside the div (like a whitespace, a comment or why not both) then Internet Explorer renders the correct height.

<div class="some-class-with-size-and-background">
&nbsp;<!-- keep to get IE to render this div -->
</div>

PHP5: Quick on calling a parents constructor

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Using OOP there comes a need to call the constructor of a parent class, this is not hard to do

class TestParent {
    public function __construct() {
        var_dump('blah');
    }
}
 
class TestChild extends TestParent {
    public function __construct() {
        parent::__construct();
    }
}
 
$a = new TestChild(); //Output will be: string 'blah' (length=4)

In PHP4 this would have looked like (this still works in PHP5)

class TestParent {
    public function TestParent() {
        var_dump('blah');
    }
}
 
class TestChild extends TestParent {
    public function TestChild() {
        parent::TestParent();
    }
}
$a = new TestChild(); //Output will be: string 'blah' (length=4)