I tried to find a way to get the raw data from the body of a HTTP request. In my case the request contained an XML document upon which my action had to act.

One of the options was to use the global $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA. However, this required altering the php.ini file.

The preferred way to achieve this eventually was to use the php://input stream wrapper. For instance, in my case the following read the XML from the request body and converts it to XML using SimpleXML:

  public function executeTest() {
         $this->xml = simplexml_load_file('php://input');
         return sfView::SUCCESS;
  }

Note: It won't work in cases where enctype="multipart/form-data". More infromation about this and other PHP wrappers can be found at http://php.net/wrappers.php