Symfony-Zone

I released a new version of the Symfony-Plugin sfAmfPlugin som hours ago. With the new version the communication between Flex and Symfony is easier than ever.The new version brings big improvements regarding the Doctrine Adapters. Relations between classes are handled better now. The error_reporting is working now as it should and there is a default implementation of a gateway module included.I hope you like it and find it useful. And as always I would like to hear from you if there are bugs or feature requests.Get it while it’s hot :-)Timo

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A lot of web applications offer to download some kind of PHP file. Maybe you want to implement some kind of export feature or you have paid content in form of a PDF or other media or you just want to secure your PDF files in the same way as the rest of your application (i.e. username/password). If this is the case you wouldn’t place your PDF-files in a subfolder of the web-Directory of your Symfony project, because all these file can be accessed directly via browser.

So how to serve your PDF-Files through a Symfony controller? it is an easy one. Just assume you put your pdf-files in a directory called “media” on the root-level of your Symfony-project.

root
  |-- apps
  |-- cache
  |-- config
  |  |-- demo.pdf
  |-- media
  |-- lib
  |-- web

These files cannot be reached by Browser, so we  need a new routing information for Symfony to get them accessible via the webbrowser. For that open the routing.yml of your application and add the following rule topmost in this file.

mediafile:
  url: /media/:filename.pdf/*
  param: { module: media, action: show }

From now on if you try to access a PDF-File in the media-folder (i.e. http://domain/media/demo.pdf) the media-Module with the action show is called. That was easy but how to implement this action. First you need to create the media module with the symfony command line tool:

$> symfony generate:module appname media

Afterwards add the following method to the class in the media/actions/actions.class.php file:

public function executeShow(sfWebRequest $request) {
  // being sure no other content wil be output
  $this->setLayout(false);
  sfConfig::set('sf_web_debug', false);

  $pdfpath = sfConfig::get('sf_root_dir').DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'media'
                       .DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR
                       .$request->getParameter('filename').'.pdf';

  // check if the file exists
  $this->forward404Unless(file_exists($pdfpath));

  // Adding the file to the Response object
  $this->getResponse()->clearHttpHeaders();
  $this->getResponse()->setHttpHeader('Pragma: public', true);
  $this->getResponse()->setContentType('application/pdf');
  $this->getResponse()->sendHttpHeaders();
  $this->getResponse()->setContent(readfile($pdfpath));

  return sfView::NONE;
}

Thats it! You can improve this Action method a little bit. For example you can add a “download”-switch. If this switch is set to 1 the file is downloaded instead of shown in the browser (i.e. http://domain/media/demo.pdf/download/1).

public function executeShow(sfWebRequest $request) {
  // being sure no other content wil be output

  $this->setLayout(false);
  sfConfig::set('sf_web_debug', false);

  $pdfpath = sfConfig::get('sf_root_dir').DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'media'
                                .DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR
                                .$request->getParameter('filename').'.pdf';

  // check if the file exists
  $this->forward404Unless(file_exists($pdfpath));

  // Adding the file to the Response object
  $this->getResponse()->clearHttpHeaders();
  $this->getResponse()->setHttpHeader('Pragma: public', true);
  $this->getResponse()->setContentType('application/pdf');

  // download-switch
  if ($request->getParameter('download', 0) == 1) {
    $this->getResponse()->setHttpHeader('Content-Disposition',
                            'attachment; filename="'.
                            $request->getParameter('filename').'"');
  }

  $this->getResponse()->sendHttpHeaders();
  $this->getResponse()->setContent(readfile($pdfpath));

  return sfView::NONE;
}

As we now use a Symfony-Controller you can do just use the complete Symfony infrastructure. You like to secure the PDF-files? Just enable the Symfony security mechanisms (is_secure: on in the security.yml) and only logged in users can download them. In the same way you can create paid content.  Or you can add watermarks to your PDF using Zend_Pdf for example.

Hope this is helpful for you.

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