Here is (the beginnings of) blogs about Symfony:

http://symfonyandy.wordpress.com/

(not maintained in a while but it saved my butt once already)

http://anywindowwithahammer.wordpress.com/

I am using jeditable which uses the jquery library to do inline editing of text on a page. However there was no way to set the maximum length of the field. I wanted to set the max length dynamically so if we changed the database definition and the model in Symfony we would not have to adjust the code.

First of all the docs on jeditable are here: http://www.appelsiini.net/projects/jeditable
look at the modification mentioned about maxlength

If you have a single line of a result set, in this case $action you do:
$column_def = $action->getTable()->getColumnDefinition('action_desc');
to get the action_desc column definition.

Then do:
$column_def['length'] gives you the length of the column.

If you need it on a table basis instead of individual row (which frankly makes a lot more sense) do:

$column_def = new sfDoctrineColumn('action_desc',Doctrine_Core::getTable('Action'));
$this->desc_field_length = $column_def->getSize();