Symphony.

Hello all,

I’m new to Symphony but not new to XSD/XML/XLS(T).

I have a project that I’d like to try to migrate to Symphony and need some help in understanding the power of the core.

I have significant existing XSD files. I’d like to know if I can import those into Symphony as “Sections” including all the existing validation rules and field types and XSD-External-References.

Or, do I have to recreate the “Sections” by hand?

Is there somewhere I can just drop them in and validate?

Thanks for any help; I’m very excited about Symphony.

I’m afraid you’ll need to set these up by hand. There isn’t yet an API for creating Sections, but it would be very cool if there was one. An XSD->Section extension would be a big step.

I think there would always be some manual work to ensure that validation rules were translated, for example different Symphony fields allow for different rules (required, regular expressions, max length etc).

Thanks nickdunn,

I would be interested in writing such an API if I could see some very detailed documentation on how sections are stored; is that available?

Thanks again.

I would be interested in writing such an API if I could see some very detailed documentation on how sections are stored; is that available?

Hehe, you’ll be lucky! The documentation efforts have be focusing on the user end, whereas the core itself is seldom documented so there isn’t anything I can show you.

You might find it useful to look at content.blueprintssections.php which is the Section editor. It makes use of the SectionManager and FieldManager classes to build/modify Sections. Each section is as simple as a single row in the sections table, and each field is (almost) as simple as a single row in the field table.

Each field class contains a displayPublishPanel method which builds the UI for when you add a field to your section (Label, the “Show column” checkboxes and so on) so this would be a place to start.

I heard word that the way in which sections/fields are stored may change in Symphony 2.1 so if you decide to implement something you might want to wait so that your work isn’t deprecated from the off.

I heard word that the way in which sections/fields are stored may change in Symphony 2.1 so if you decide to implement something you might want to wait so that your work isn’t deprecated from the off.

I think it will take quite some time until we see Symphony 2.1.

Thank you nickdunn; very much appreciated.