Delightful Dummy Data with Alice

Hey Danilo Silva

Yeah, you are right!
Alice has changed a lot in its newer version and it contains many BC breaks. We will discuss about it, so we can deliver a nice solution :)

Cheers!

Yep, we're already working on a few video notes so that people will know to use the older version for now :). The 3.0 release was just about a week or two ago... so the problem just started showing up!

Hey Scott,

Thanks for sharing it with us! Here's a link to the docs with a bit more description about seeding the Faker's generator: https://github.com/fzaninot...

Cheers!

cool thanks. I was pulling my hair wondering why I kept getting the same data then it clicked, I shouldn't do these things too late at night :p

Hey Syed,

I think you can move flush() out of the foreach statement, so Doctrine will just persist() all the objects first and then flush() them at once.

Yes, you can register NelmioAliceBundle in your AppKernel and then configure it in app/config/config_dev.yml, check their docs for more information: https://github.com/nelmio/a... . Service "nelmio_alice.file_loader" has only one public method loadFile() where you need to pass path to the file you want to load. Then it will parse the file and load data by itself.

Cheers!

Hi Victor,

Thanks for the reply. Moving the flush() out of the foreach works great! I also had no idea (until reading the Symfony docs) https://symfony.com/doc/master/bundles/DoctrineFixturesBundle/index.html#using-the-container-in-the-fixtures that we had access to the container in our Fixtures class.

With that I was able to load the nelmio_alice.file_loader service and load the yml file that way. So my load function now becomes

$fileLoader = $this->container->get('nelmio_alice.file_loader');
$objectSet = $fileLoader->loadFile(__DIR__.'/fixtures.yml')->getObjects();
foreach($objectSet as $object) {
  $manager->persist($object);
}
$manager->flush();```

Hey Syed,

Excellent! I'm glad you got it working and thanks for sharing it with others.

Cheers!

Hey Tom!

Bah, yea. First, thank you for sharing this! Second, I currently only recommend Alice if you use the *old* version. The setup for the new version looks crazy to me... and YAML fixtures should be fun and easy, not a technical challenge :).

Thanks again for sharing - very happy you're enjoying the tuts!

Hello, weaverryan!
What would you recommend for Alice replacement? I've just updated from 3.2 to 4.2 and does it mean that the fixtures system needs the complete rework?

Hey Andrei V. ,

For Symfony 4 we recommend using DoctrineFixturesBundle along with Faker library, we even have a related screencasts for it in our Symfony 4 series, you can check it here: https://symfonycasts.com/sc... .

Cheers!

victor, thanks, Victor! I've already seen that and it looks awesome but not as awesome as Alice was. It was just an attempt to find something yml-like)

Hey Andrei V. ,

Ah, I see... Then just use the same hautelook/AliceBundle but follow the docs for the 2nd version of it. That's still the best probably with active support :)

Cheers!

victor, I've already rewritten my fixtures for standard Doctrine Fixtures. It wasn't as hard as I thought it would) Thanks for your help!

Hey Andrei V. ,

Ah, OK! :) Fairly speaking, doing fixtures in PHP is even more fun, at least for me, since I can get IDE autocompletion, etc and these fixtures are more flexible than Yaml one :p You can easily complicate them, not always possible that easy with Alice.

Cheers!

Hey Fenring,

I personally don't use AliceBundle in my unit tests, could you look at this thread, maybe this will help to fix your problem: https://knpuniversity.com/s... . But I think a better practice is do not use AliceBundle in tests and instead boot Symfony kernel and set only that data you need before running each test - PHPUnit helps with it well.

Cheers!

Hey Felipe Javier Viñoles

It may be related to your PHP version, but I'm not 100% sure, which version are you using ?
Which version of nelmio-alice are you trying to install ? also make sure that your composer is updated

Cheers!

Hi, I installed php 7 and everything is ok
.

So you could run "composer install" after installing PHP 7 and everything ran fine ? or you got that error after PHP installation ?

Hey Hans!

Wow, you should totally submit this as a pull request to Alice - it's a great bug fix! Either way, thanks for posting here!

Hi Carmen Fabo!

I think I know the problem :). When you reference @group_*, this references the keys you're using in your file - e.g. grab, rotation, etc. You should update the keys under your Groupe entity to all start with the same prefix. For example:

AppBundle\Entity\Groupe:
    groupe_grab:
        nom: Grab
    groupe_rotation:
        nom: Rotation
    # ...

I hope that helps! Cheers!

Thank you very much ! that helps me to understand how it works. I get another error, I look for a solution.
Cheers !

It works ! hallelujah ! ♬ ♬ ♬ hallelujah ! etc.

Hey Stephane,

It seems you have syntax error in your fixtures: you missed `,` or `;` somewhere, but it difficult to say where - I don't see your code. Please, double check code of your fixtures. With PHP files PhpStorm helps well, but with YAML most probably you should do it manually. Btw, is it a public project? Could you show me content of your fixture?

Cheers!

Hello Victor,
It's the current tutorial. Here is the YAML file fixtures.yml :

AppBundle\Entity\Genus:
    genus_{1..10}:
        name: <name()>
        subFamily: <text(20)>
        speciesCount: <numberBetween(100, 100000)>
        funFact: <sentence()>

And the LoadFixtures.php file :

namespace AppBundle\DataFixtures\ORM;

use AppBundle\Entity\Genus;
use Doctrine\Common\DataFixtures\FixtureInterface;
use Doctrine\Common\Persistence\ObjectManager;
use Nelmio\Alice\Fixtures;

class LoadFixtures implements FixtureInterface
{
    public function load(ObjectManager $manager)
    {
        Fixtures::load(__DIR__.'/fixtures.yml', $manager);
    }
}

Sorry, the indentation does not display.

Stephane

Hey Stephane,

As I see you have unexpected ="" symbol in numberbetween() function, please, remove it. I bet it's the problem, the right line should be:

AppBundle\Entity\Genus:
    genus_{1..10}:
        speciesCount: <numberBetween(100, 100000)>

and btw, consider a correct letter case: numberBetween() not numberbetween() ;)

P.S. I tweak styles in your message a bit to improve code readability: use pre and code tags for formatting, or take a look at GitHub's Gist service.

Cheers!

Hi Victor,

I have checked my code, and there is no syntax error like you describe. Maybe the typo in my post above comes from when I paste the code in my message and when trying to indent the code.
It still does not work.

This is what I found in Reference.php file :
private static $regex = '/^[\',\"]?'
.'(?:(?<multi>\d+)x\ )?'
.'@(?<reference>[\p{L}\d\_\.\*\/\-]+)'
.'(?<sequence>\{(?P<from>\d+)\.\.(?P<to>\d+)\})?'
.'(?:\->(?<property>[\p{L}\d_.*\/-]+))?'
.'[\',\"]?$'
.'/xi';

Line 20 is the line just below private static. So I suspect there is a bug in the regex ?

Stephane

Hi Stephane!

Hmm, yes, this is very strange - it almost seems like that line 20 has a syntax error in the PHP file itself, which definitely doesn't make any sense (I've checked on the alice repository, and I don't see any reports of a similar error). Just in case there was some sort of corruption when downloading alice, try this:

rm -rf vendor/
composer install

Also, what version of PHP are you on?

Cheers!

Hello Ryan,
I tried your instructions but still having the error message.
I also tried to copy the finish version of the two files fixtures.yml and LoadFixtures.php from the source code directory.
Maybe it's a php version conflict.
I am using MAMP PRO v4.0.5 on OS X El Capitan. I have setup MAMP Pro and Apache to use PHP 5.6.25. I think I have properly setup PHP Storm to use MAMP Pro PHP version.
I even tried to manually install PHP 5.6.25 on my Mac to override the former php installation. But when I open a terminal window and type PHP -v, the version is 5.5.36.

Good news Ryan and Victor.
I have started again Course 3 from the beginning, with a clean start code.
Now, I don't have errors anymore with Nelmio/Alice.
So now I can continue the course.
I don't know where the error was.
Stephane

Hey Stephane!

This type of error is *really* weird - great job on thinking to start from scratch to fix it! Sometimes, you can even get weird things in files like hidden whitespace characters that can cause problems. This is pretty rare, but I can remember a few times when I've had something weird like this and have pulled my hair out debugging it.

Onward from here! Cheers!

Hey Jack,

Thanks for sharing your solution! Yes, looks like it's required for DoctrineFixturesBundle. But If you're using the default service configuration, any class that implements ORMFixtureInterface will automatically be registered with this tag, see https://symfony.com/doc/mas... for more information.

Cheers!

Hey 0x90 ,

Could you provide a bit more information? What version of PhpStorm do you use? Do you have the "PHP Annotations" plugin installed for PhpStorm? And please, show the part of your entity when you get this error (Show us how you use this namespace and some property where you try to use it and get error). We would be happy to help you with it. Thanks!

Cheers!

Certainly.

- I have the 2016.1 (most recently patched) version of PhpStorm and IntelliJ IDEA on two different machines
- Both have PHP Annotations and Symfony

Here's the screenshot with ORM in the namespace:

http://imgur.com/App8un7

Here's the screenshot without ORM in the namespace:

http://imgur.com/wcNLEqw

$ pwd;ls
/[...]/src/AppBundle/DataFixtures/ORM
LoadFixtures.php fixtures_blog.yml fixtures_projects.yml

I think I've seen this before actually - it's a bug in PhpStorm itself. Sometimes, for some reason, it suddenly thinks that a namespace has a syntax error in it. I copy the entire namepace line, delete it, wait a moment, then paste it back. For me, PhpStorm is happy once I do this.

Let me know if this works!

Of course I had to encounter the weird bug. :P Thanks, that fixed it.

OMG, a couple of hours of frustration and now I've found the solution myself... I just had to use hautelook_alice:doctrine:fixtures:load

Ok, maybe this will be helpful to somebody, so the steps are:
1) composer require --dev hautelook/alice-bundle doctrine/data-fixtures
2) activate it in the AppKernel:
$bundles[] = new Hautelook\AliceBundle\HautelookAliceBundle();
3) create an yml file in the src/AppBundle/DataFixtures/ORM folder (we don't need any additional classes there)
4) ./bin/console hautelook_alice:doctrine:fixtures:load

Additionally, configure the bundle in the config_dev.yml

P.S. And locale setting doesn't work for me for some reason. I set
hautelook_alice:
locale: ru

but to no effect.