We recently had a weird situation here at work where we needed to use the Url helper of Symfony inside the actions.class.php of a module. This helper is available in the view, but not in the actions class by default.

Of course, we can include this, and this was my first approach. Simply using:

include_once('symfony/helper/UrlHelper.php');

worked fine for me. However, when my co-worker updated his code from Subversion, it went BOOM. He got a rather annoying FATAL error about not being able to redeclare a function. It's weird, because it worked in my situation.

The solution is simple though, and was available in the Symfony trac. Ticket #899 contains the solution, which is more simple than you could imagine:

sfLoader::loadHelpers(array('Url'));

Simple!