Here are situations I stumbled upon, let me know if you have found some more:

1. if your model contains a validation rule ‘isUnique’ then afterFind() gets called from $model->invalidFields() with a result of SELECT COUNT():
   array(array(array(’count’ => 1)))
2. another results scheme is yielded by a model association (e.g. via belongsTo):
   array(’id’ => 123, ‘first_name’ => ‘Joe’…)
3. and then there’s the regular $model->find() which gives
   array(
   0 => array(’ModelName’ => array(’id’ => 123, …)),
   1 => array(’ModelName’ => array(’id’ => 124, …))
   )

So what is the best way to work with this omnishaped variable?

First skip everything if there are no results:

Then check for case 2 (assuming your primary key is ‘id’):

then for case 3:

and lastly you can check for the count result if you care:

My webroot is set to app/webroot and Eclipse stops on a breakpoint only if it’s in app/webroot/index.php
Even after it stops there it won’t stop on a next breakpoint that is set in my controller.

The only working solution I found is downgrading to Eclipse 3.3.2 (Europa) and PDT 1.0.3.v20080603. Fortunately both can run side by side so in theory, I can write new code in Ganymede and debug in Europa but that sucks. Programming is a constant debugging.

I could try to switch from XDebug to DBG. Maybe I will next time I have a day that I can waste.

Update:

New PDT 2.0.0.v20081030-1802 works with Ganymede/XDebug just fine. It also has features I have been missing like Mark Occurrences - one more reason for switching. It doesn’t have support for chm help files though (PHPEclipse does) and is generally slower than PHPEclipse.

2008-11-15 minus 2008-10-01 can’t be one if you’re calculating rent. It must be 1.466…

Note: end date is not inclusive.

The idea originally came from doublethink (written in Czech) who made a text field in Word, saved it as HTML and then dig through the mess to extract the essence. I just went a step further and did the same for images as well.

Start by adding this to tag HTML:

Images

We’re lucky Word knows how to insert pictures and “wrap” the text behind/above the picture.

Place the whole thing directly into BODY, both parts where the image is supposed to be. Please note that the IMG tag will be used only for engines other than Word and MSIE.

ID “headerImg” is there to provide reference for further formatting - although don’t expect it to work in Word/Outlook.The only universal method is to use inline CSS via STYLE. Also like it or not, you’ll have to duplicate your formatting definition - define it both for V:SHAPE and for IMG (or DIV, see below).

Others

Other stuff must be wrapped in a div like this:

I’m sure you have already guessed the meaning of attributes filled (background color) and stroked (frame border). Remember, this is Word so we’re talking about a “text frame”.

That’s also a reason why you have to use margin-left and margin-top instead of top and left, or even margin: top right bottom left. And don’t forget to add width to every absolutely positioned element - in numbers, “auto” doesn’t count.

Duplicate formatting

Sweet, huh? Here’s what I used to make my life easier. We’re PHP programmers, remember?

The output will still contain duplicated formatting but at least, you have a single place for changes.

How to debug

The first method that comes to your mind is probably to run your mailing script and then wait for the e-mail to arrive to your Outlook. Since we’re in fact debugging for Word I preferred to open it directly in Word. I wrote my script to display the HTML “e-mail” as a web page instead of sending it and then I opened the url in Word via CTRL+O. You are allowed to paste a url and Word downloads it.

For command line lovers (like me):

You’ll have to be careful about local cache so append fictitious parameters in order to force reload:

During early stages debug locally with dummy data, of course. No need for the HTML page to be generated by a script using real data. Note though, that when you open a file in Word you cannot write to it using another editor. And when you save from Word you get back all the marvellous garble that you have worked so hard to erase. Enjoy!

Some formatting must be applied to a child element

Did I mention that text-align: right works only when it’s NOT in the DIV we position but in its child? The same is true for font-family, font-weight and font-size:

will work while if you join the two DIVs together, it will not.

It can be caused by (among other things) one of these two reasons:

• you ignore time zones
• you use message’s sent date instead of delivery date

Here’s a piece of code that could put you on a right track:

I could deal with time zones better (finding out what time zone the IMAP server is in and build $lastCheckDate from $lastCheckTimestamp in that time zone). I’m lazy though so I simply deduct 24 hours. That deals with messages delivered around midnight if you’re not in GMT.

Using a sent timestamp instead of a delivery timestamp is a common pitfall. As far as I know, all PHP functions that return message date return sent date (i.e. information from header Date:) and no delivery date. A message can travel for a long time before getting to you. If you check the mailbox once in an hour it can easily happen that you skip a message that was held in a queue somewhere on its way for more than an hour. Also sender’s computer time can be set wrongly. Remember that the information entered into Date: can be anything. It’s the sender’s e-mail client who decides about it.

How to debug

The last issue I had to deal with was what date format the IMAP server expects in your SEARCH SINCE command. 11-Apr-2008 worked for me (both 01-Apr-2008 and 1-Apr-2008 are fine) but if you’re getting no results you might want to take a peek under the hood. Here’s how to telnet to the IMAP server and ask yourself:

Enter this into the telnet window to talk to the IMAP server:

These are just commands that you say, I don’t include responses. Please note that you have to start each of your commands with an increasing number. It doesn’t have to be a regular row of numbers, the next number just has to be bigger than the previous one.The search command returns a list of message UIDs that meet your criteria. To see header of each message try this:

and now after upgrading to 8.1+ you’re getting:
ERROR: functions in index expression must be marked IMMUTABLE

The reason is that date_trunc may return different results based on the current time zone. There’s an example query in PostgreSQL Mailing List Archives that you can run to believe.

If you are absolutely sure that you will always access your data with the same time zone you can redefine your index like this:

The whole immutable business with indexes containing functions that process timestamps is well explained in these threads:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-interfaces/…/msg00045.php
http://www.webservertalk.com/archive307-2007-2-1817943.html
http://www.mydatabasesupport.com/forums/…-possible.html

All credit goes to Tom Lane. I admire him for being always so patient and polite, and for spending so much of his valuable time with talking to users. I would love to link to his homepage but I failed to find it.

or more robust version:

Although I should have read the manual I didn’t and installed AppSlipRotate.prc and StatusBarLib.prc

After Hotsync my Palm went into a never ending reset loop. A system reset helped with the loop however, my silk screen area and status bar were gray with nothing on them and when I pressed the Applications button I went into reset again.

I found out that I was able to use my Contacts button to launch my Contacts application. I was also able to access Buttons configuration in Settings so I decided to assign a file manager to my Contact button and remove the two troublesome files.

Soon I discovered that I can run only text-based applications which unfortunately excluded Resco Explorer (probably the best file manager out there).
FileZ and LeftOvers were two recommended solutions I found during my search. FileZ caused my Palm to reset immediately, LeftOvers reset after I tried to delete the files.

So I installed pz. I couldn’t directly delete the two files because my Palm would reset each time pz wanted to display a confirmation pop-up window (Are you sure you want to delete…). I decided to change their file type first, from aexo to something else that won’t be executed after reset. I must have been something meaningful so I chose panl (Settings panel).

After another system reset I recovered my silk screen and status bar although, normal reset still threw me into a reset loop. This time though, I was able to get past the confirmation pop-up and finally delete the files with pz.

Next reset was really the last reset I had to do. Things are back to normal. Thank the Palm God!

If you ever wanted to have month number without the leading zeroes, here’s how:

or even a cooler way:

(because you can use almost any PHP function as Smarty variable modifier, just solve the parameters-order problem)

Question

Got any better solution? Tell me about it!

So here’s what I use:

When I want to report something I call:

Then in your main file you run this:

Include this into template (preferably the part that is included into every template):

And then in css, define all message types:

Question

Do you use something like this or something more clever? Share your wisdom :-)