Most of the time (so far for me, always) you can change the frameworks behavior, without any danger of creating future compatibility with updates.

First off, I agree completely with the points above, but for those purists.. I have a few nags:

I am pretty annoyed about standards however. The form validation puts stray div’s with custom style=”display:none” If there has not been an error, which makes your code look ugly.

The Ajax helpers use “document.write” INLINE for writing Ajax updaters etc.. now thats just nasty - I really like my prototype to be nicely bundled, and chucked into a included file, with some nice prototype.behavior extensions to apply them to my elements (seamlessly).

It’ll be interesting to see I can get around the inbuilt form validation, and implement my own version too, thats what I’m battling with at the moment.

Glad to see you are exploring Symfony.
I added some comments to the action to clarify.
Hope it helps :)
Note that there is some additional code in there, for added functionality from:
http://www.mellowmorning.com/2007/09/08/ten-reasons-why-symfony-rocks-part-2/

public function executeUpdate()
{
//if not an ajax request send them a 404
if(!$this->getRequest()->isXmlHttpRequest()) $this->forward404();
$comment = new Comment;
$comment->setAuthor($this->getRequestParameter('author'));
$comment->setBody($this->getRequestParameter('body'));
$comment->save();
//set the comment variable for the template
$comments[] = $comment;
$this->comments = $comments;
//dealing with caching
$sf_root_cache_dir = sfConfig::get(’sf_root_cache_dir’);
$cache_dir = $sf_root_cache_dir.’/frontend/*/template/*/all’;
sfToolkit::clearGlob($cache_dir.’/*/*/comment.cache’);
sfToolkit::clearGlob($cache_dir.’/*/comment.cache’);
}

Cheers,
Thierry

I was just reading your blog article about symfony handling AJAX forms (http://www.mellowmorning.com/2007/08/18/ten-reasons-why-symfony-rocks-part-1/)
Since I’m developing a small application with Symfony at the moment, I was trying to set up something similar like you did with your demo-guestbook (http://www.mellowmorning.com/symfony-examples/comment). Unfortunately, it didn’t work yet…

My question: Could you send me the action, that is handling the request being sent by the AJAX form? I think that could help me a lot with understanding how this works.

Thanks in advance and regards from Germany,
Matthias

Für den Fall das einige Leute immer noch nicht begriffen haben warum symfony so rockt, hat Thierry Schellenbach die 10, seiner Meinung nach, wichtigsten Gründe aufgezählt. Und ich kann nur dazu sagen, der ja so Recht Ten reasons why Symfony rocks …