Tag: PHP

Use PHP to query the Mimecast API

Mimecast has fairly detailed documentation and code examples for their API but nothing for PHP.

Here’s a basic PHP code example for their “Get Account” API endpoint. I used their Python sample code as a starting point. You’ll need to update the base URL and the keys to use it.

<?php

// Setup required variables
$baseUrl = 'https://xx-api.mimecast.com';
$uri = '/api/account/get-account';
$url = $baseUrl.$uri;
$accessKey = 'YOUR ACCESS KEY';
$secretKey = 'YOUR SECRET KEY';
$appId = 'YOUR APPLICATION ID';
$appKey = 'YOUR APPLICATION KEY';

// Generate request header values
$requestId = uniqid();
$hdrDate = gmdate('r');

// DataToSign is used in hmac_sha1
$dataToSign = implode(':', array($hdrDate, $requestId, $uri, $appKey));

// Create the HMAC SHA1 of the Base64 decoded secret key for the Authorization header
$hmacSha1 = hash_hmac('sha1', $dataToSign, base64_decode($secretKey), true);

// Use the HMAC SHA1 value to sign the hdrDate + ":" requestId + ":" + URI + ":" + appkey
$sig = base64_encode($hmacSha1);

// Create request headers
$headers = array(
    'Authorization: MC '.$accessKey.':'.$sig,
    'x-mc-req-id: '.$requestId,
    'x-mc-app-id: '.$appId,
    'x-mc-date: '.$hdrDate,
    'Content-Type: application/json',
    'Accept: application/json',
);

$payload = json_encode(array('data' => array()));

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $payload);

print_r(json_decode(curl_exec($ch)));

curl_close($ch);

Symfony 2: Using @ParamConverter with multiple Doctrine entities

Symfony 2 describes how to use parameter converters to translate slugs to entities, but their example does not enforce the relationship between the two entities. Here’s their example:

/**
 * @Route("/blog/{date}/{slug}/comments/{comment_slug}")
 * @ParamConverter("post", options={"mapping": {"date": "date", "slug": "slug"}})
 * @ParamConverter("comment", options={"mapping": {"comment_slug": "slug"}})
 */
public function showAction(Post $post, Comment $comment)
{
}

Assuming that Post has id and slug attributes and that Comment has id, post, and slug attributes, the above example does not require that the Post slug in the URL match the Comment’s Post. Here’s an example that requires that the Post and Comment are related:

/**
 * @Route("/blog/{post_date}/{post_slug}/comments/{slug}")
 * @ParamConverter("post", options={"mapping": {"post_date": "date", "post_slug": "slug"}})
 */
public function showAction(Post $post, Comment $comment)
{
}

This example works because Post is processed first and because $post is named the same as the Comment::$post relationship. When it comes time to process the Comment, it attempts to use slug and post to find the Comment instead of just slug. (No @ParamConverter annotation is necessary for the Comment because the parameters are named the same as the attributes.) If $post doesn’t match $comment->post, a 404 is returned, no additional checks required.

Vim: Indext PHP case and default statements in a switch block

By default, Vim does not indent case and default statements inside of a switch block in a PHP file:

switch ($foo) {
case 'bar':
    // do something
    break;
}

It turns out a single line in one’s vimrc can fix that:

let g:PHP_vintage_case_default_indent = 1

Now indenting is correct:

switch ($foo) {
    case 'bar':
        // do something
        break;
}

Special Characters and MediaWikis Do Not Mix

I have run a MediaWiki wiki for my house on campus for close to two years. When I set it up, I gave it the name “Saint Claude de La Colombière Men’s Catholic House,” and since MediaWiki accepted this name complete with two accented characters, I assumed it wasn’t a problem. For an unknown reason, it became a problem today. It started throwing the annoying “Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 20971520 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 122880 bytes) in /home/www/claude/w/includes/Revision.php on line 361” errors. I tried increasing the memory allocated to PHP, looking through Apache log files, and upgrading the version of the MediaWiki software.

After at least an hour of frustration accumulated throughout the day, it occurred to me that this only happens on one page: the “About” page. This page, in standard MediaWiki fashion, is actually called: “Saint Claude de La Colombière Men’s Catholic House: About.” Then it hit me that perhaps those accented characters weren’t such a good idea after all. As soon as I changed the value in the LocalSettings.php to something more reasonable and accent free:

$wgSitename = "Saint Claude de La Colombiere Men's Catholic House";

everything started working again as normal.

I would be very curious to know why this worked in the past. I suppose it could have to do with my versions of Ubuntu Server, Apache, PHP, MediaWiki, etc. However, it’s one more thing to check when PHP starts throwing out of memory exceptions.

Edit: It turns out that increasing the memory to PHP was the solution as today I started experiencing the same error on other pages. I increased the LocalSettings.php memory limit from 20 MB to 32 MB.

ini_set( 'memory_limit', '32M' );

and this (actually) solved the problem. Before, I was editing the php.ini file, and it would appear that the LocalSettings.php was overriding the global value even though it was higher. Special characters may still be a bad idea.