Give me Clean URL Strings (slugs!)

Hey Mehul-J!

The concepts in this tutorial should still work just fine on Symfony 5. But if you download the course code, it uses Symfony 3. Many of the core concepts about ManyToMany relationships are more recently covered in https://symfonycasts.com/sc... (which at this moment, is still being released - https://symfonycasts.com/sc... is an almost-identical version for Symfony 4). The unique stuff in this tutorial is really the form collection stuff, which hasn't changed much since Symfony 3.

If you have any questions along the way, you can definitely ask them :).

Cheers!

Hey Michał,

I'm happy you were able to get it working yourself! And thank you for sharing your solution with others :)

Cheers!

Hey Johan,

Actually, everything is much easier, probably for safety. When exception occurs during migration - everything before the failed SQL query is kept, i.e. doesn't reverted. But you can revert some migrations manually using `doctrine:migrations:execute MIGRATION_VERION --down` command. However in most cases it could fail too (especially if exception was thrown in the middle of migration with many separate addSql() calls, but it depends). That's why you probably need to manually execute only *some* queries directly on your SQL server.

Cheers!

That makes sense, thanks

Btw, I *think* you could manually catch exception with try-catch statement in up() method of migration and do some revert there, but be careful, this way you could missing that something goes wrong and to be honest I have never done it. And probably it's pointless if you have a lot of addSql() calls in migration.

Hey Richard ,

Unfortunately, I don't have an example of it, but for such a big and complex tasks we don't use Doctrine migrations. Well, we do use migrations to actually add a column, like slug one, but also we create a one-time migration Symfony command and after Doctrine migrations were executed, run this command to actually populate slugs for all the entities. The problem is that task takes some time, so it's not a good idea to run it in Doctrine migrations because this task could simple failed and your DB will left unsynced. But if your one-time migration command will fail, no problem, just restart it again. Of course, you need to make sure it's safe to run this command more than one time, you just need to skip already handled entities. That's it.

Cheers!

Thanks for the reply. I get what you're saying but I meant to suggest (not very well!) that the course notes might include the one operation SQL to generate the slugs since many of us are learning here to migrate existing systems.

Hey Richard ,

Unfortunately, we can't cover all the cases, because it'll be to wide for this tutorial. Basically, we show in our tutorials new projects. It's up to you to follow tutorials on your existent project, and that's great for learning, but you need to be ready for extra work.

It'd be a good idea to add a tip about generating slugs with SQL if it would be a good practice here, but it's not, especially if we're talking about legacy projects which have big data. First of all, you need to use a library to generate URI-compatible slugs, and then you need a custom logic written in PHP to make those slugs unique. So doing all of this in Doctrine migration is not a good idea - better use custom migration command. And probably you won't have a robust solution with one simple SQL query. But more complex example is out of the range of this course.

Cheers!

Hey Nikolay,

Yes, you can. "Getting Crazy with Form Themes" course was the base for this course. But keep in mind that the finish code from previous course not a start code for the new one because often we do some tweaks before starting a new course. And our GitHub repositories contains only start code. If you want the finish code of the course, you need to download it on any chapter page, but you need to have an active subscription or own a course to do it.

Cheers!

Глянул, вы с Украины Виктор. Я с английским не очень, поэтому отвечу по русски. Спасибо за ответ - я оплатил месячную подписку и все что нужно (стартовый код) скачал. Код от предыдущего курса не подошел - для данного курса вы, видимо, делали добавления какие то. Спасибо за ваш труд и поддержку новичков!

Symfony - the best framework!

Да, обычно каждый новый курс содержит какие-то небольшие правки и дополнения для того чтобы подготовить его к новой теме. Поэтому лучше начинать со стартового кода. Если вы работаете с Git - вы можете скачать финишный код предыдущего курса, добавить его в Git (закомитить) и потом перезаписать файлы стартовым кодом из нового курса и команда "git diff" покажет вам разницу между финишным кодом предыдущего курса и стартовым кодом нового. Это в случае если вам интересно что конкретно было изменено. Потом, эти изменения сможете применить конкртено на вашем коде и продолжать новый курс на своем старом проекте.

Cheers!

Hey Nina,

Unique fields could be blank, i.e. could be null if you allow it. But unique fields cannot be the same, I mean, cannot be equal to the same string whether it's an empty string, etc, because an empty string is not equal to NULL - those are different things.

Yes, slug is a text field which means to be a valid to be used in URLs. And slugs are more readable than IDs, so it's more popular for SEO. For example, "/page/about" is more readable than "/page/28", where "about" is a unique slug of the article and 28 is its ID. So, you can use IDs for that, but slugs are more "hipster" way now :)

Cheers!