I was reminded by maxi_million in the comments on one of my previous LiveUser tutorial entries that I never completed the promised third entry in that series. After the initial procrastination wore off and I initially turned my mind to writing this piece, my main project using LiveUser ended up being converted (for various reasons) into a drupal site, so my further use of the library has been quite minimal. But I do have a little code sitting around, so will try and draw together a few notes on how I was using Liveuser.

While many powerful authorization systems are purely role-based, something that can be achieved in LiveUser with the groups functionality covered in the previous entry on this subject, LiveUser also supports much more fine grained permissions. Each permission is its own entity, and permissions are grouped into areas. I created my areas directly in the database so won’t be covering that here. Once you have your area’s id in the variable $area_id and an instance of LiveUser_Admin in $admin you can call:

$right = $admin->perm->addRight(
  array('area_id' => $area_id, 
    'right_define_name' => 'a name for your right'));

to create the right and capture its ID in $right.

You can then ‘grant’ that right to a user with:

$admin->perm->grantUserRight(
  array('right_id' => $right, 
    'perm_user_id' => $perm_user_id));

Or grant it to a group with:

$admin->perm->grantGroupRight(
  array('right_id' => $right, 
    'group_id' => $group_id));

Where I ran into problems was when I attempted to check those permissions. From the API documentation, it wasn’t clear how to check for a right given only its name, but after a little exploration I put together the following method (used within my wrapper class) that handles it. $this->user is an instance of LiveUser and $this->admin is an instance of LiveUser_Admin:

function checkRight($area_id, $right_desc) {
  if (empty($this->admin)) {
    $this->getAdminInstance();
  }
  $filter = array(
    "fields" => array("right_id"),
    "filters" => array(
      "area_id" => $area_id,
      "right_define_name" => $right_desc));
  $rights = array_keys($this->admin->getRights($filter));
  $right_id = $rights[0];
  return $this->user->_perm->checkRight($right_id);
}

You’ll note that the final line makes use of the _perm property. In PEAR coding conventions a preceding underscore means a method or property is private and should not be accessed from outside the class, but this was the neatest approach I was able to find in the time. If anyone can tell me how to do this within the approved public API I’ll happily update this entry.

Update: Be sure to check out the comments, where Lukas has been adding some very useful information.

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I promised more work on XML_Feed_Parser this month and am pleased to say I found the time. The first beta, version 0.3, is on its way into PEAR.

Two key developments in this version are support for the ‘content’ module in RSS2 and fix of a serious bug in the main __call method. I was accessing the compatMap variable (that handles the mapping of element names between different syndication formats) directly, and calling array_pop on it. That threw up problems if you wanted to access the same element multiple times, so I’ve added in a temporary variable to fix that.

The main development, however, is experimental support for the tidy library. If you think (or know) the feed you’re working with might not be valid XML, you can now choose to have tidy clean up the code before it gets handed to the DOM. Handling ill-formed XML is a much requested feature, and initial testing of this solution yields positive results.

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Paying projects have kept me away from XML_Feed_Parser for the past couple of months, but today finally brought time to get a new release into shape.

The main focus has been on working through the tests that come with The Universal Feed Parser. I have a (rudimentary) script that converts those tests into PHP and makes some syntax conversion to bring them into line with my package. There’s still some hand tweaking required to get the tests running properly, but for the time being that seems preferable to writing a full lexer.

With those tweaks in place, the package now passes the majority of the Atom 1.0 tests. Along the way I’ve added a few new compatibility features (guid now maps to id in atom, in some cases uses of url/href will automatically map to uri where that’s appropriate), and cleaned up the workings of the __call magic function that does a lot of the dispatching within and between the classes.

Another major addition is the decoding of base64 encoded atom:text constructs.

Hopefully development will pick up speed over the next few weeks. My aim is to have a beta out some time in January.

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There’s a new version (0.2.5alpha) of XML_Feed_Parser in the wild.

I’ve cleaned up the handling of xml:base considerably, finally switching over to using PHP DOM’s baseURI attribute and checking the bases for all links returned, whether from link constructs or in text constructs with the type ‘xhtml’. That coincides with reworking the getText() and getContent() methods for atom so they now properly recognise the different types that the atom spec allows. There’s a little more work to do to properly allow non text/html mime types in atom:content, since I don’t want to return less common mime types without a way for the user to check the type beforehand. That should come in the next version.

I’ve had one enquiry as to whether the package will work for those not using PEAR. It’s dependency on PEAR is limited to the PEAR_Exception class, so for those who genuinely need to use it without PEAR, you could declare an empty class called PEAR_Exception that extends Exception and everything else should work. For those wondering whether there’s any way to get the code working with PHP4, the answer is ‘no’ since I make so much use of the PHP5 DOM implementation, plus simplexml and exceptions. For those looking for PHP4 support, check out Magpie.

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Last night I initiated the Call For Votes on XML_Feed_Parser’s inclusion in PEAR. The package isn’t quite where I want it to be, but after several months’ work, the core functionality is all in place and the first round of unit tests are all passed successfully.

So if you’re a PEAR developer… please go and vote! (feedback is still welcome from those who aren’t)

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