A few weeks ago, I was working on one of our client’s sites, built on the Symfony 1.4 framework. We were having trouble with a page littered with asynchronous Javascript code, and seeing timing and data issues. After an hour of debugging, I tracked down the issue to a crucial behavioural tick that was fixed in a later release of JQuery. Updating was pretty painless, and testing on that page and the rest of the site seemed to have given us a touch of a speed up as well. Going from 1.4.2 to the latest patched 1.6 had been a smooth ride.

Quickly though, our integration testing raised a problem. The date selectors littered throughout the system were now acting screwy. We’re using thesfFormWidgetExtra plugin to get date pickers for the date fields on forms. This gives two things:

1. A three combo box selector for the day, month and year, which can be adjusted to add a time as well, handy for precise selection
2. A datepicker button to give you a formatted, JQuery UI date picker.

Although the date picker was working normally, the day selector in the drop down had all the <options> set to disabled. The options loaded correctly, such that the currently selected option was selected, but now as a user you had to use the date picker to select the day.

Weird right? I dug around the widget display code for a bit and couldn’t find much. But then I found this old ticket in the Symfony bug tracker, and all was made clear.

The detail is in the bug but in summary, JQuery changed the way it accesses DOM properties versus attributes, but sfFormExtra hasn’t been updated to change this. There are two solutions: one is that you write your own widgets that inherit from the provided widgets, and then update the template code there. The second is lazier, but on a given project you can just update the code yourself in the sfWidgetFormJqueryDate and sfWidgetFormJqueryDateTime classes. Since we were short of time, I did the latter, which resolved the issue.

However, I’m intending on going back and writing a widget for it. This will let us better track the differences as JQuery gets updated on these old projects, and will also let us keep any other changes in line.