CakePHP 1.3 Application Development Cookbook

CakePHP 1.3 Application Development Cookbook

Overview of this book

CakePHP is a rapid development framework for PHP that provides an extensible architecture for developing, maintaining, and deploying web applications. While the framework has a lot of documentation and reference guides available for beginners, developing more sophisticated and scalable applications require a deeper knowledge of CakePHP features, a challenge that proves difficult even for well established developers.The recipes in this cookbook will give you instant results and help you to develop web applications, leveraging the CakePHP features that allow you to build robust and complex applications. Following the recipes in this book you will be able to understand and use these features in no time. We start with setting up authentication on a CakePHP application. One of the most important aspects of a CakePHP application: the relationship between models, also known as model bindings. Model binding is an integral part of any application's logic and we can manipulate it to get the data we need and when we need. We will go through a series of recipes that will show us how to change the way bindings are fetched, what bindings and what information from a binding is returned, how to create new bindings, and how to build hierarchical data structures. We also define our custom find types that will extend the three basic ones, allowing our code to be even more readable and also create our own find type, with pagination support. This book also has recipes that cover two aspects of CakePHP models that are fundamental to most applications: validation, and behaviors.

CakePHP 1.3 Application Development Cookbook

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

Authentication

Introduction

Setting up a basic authentication system

Using and configuring the Auth component

Allowing logins with username or e-mail

Saving the user details after login

Getting the current user's information

Using prefixes for role-based access control

Setting up Access Control Layer-based authentication

Integrating with OpenID

Model Bindings

Introduction

Adding Containable to all models

Limiting the bindings returned in a find

Modifying binding parameters for a find

Modifying binding conditions for a find

Changing the JOIN type of one-to-one associations

Defining multiple associations to the same model

Adding bindings on the fly

Pushing the Search

Introduction

Performing GROUP and COUNT queries

Using virtual fields

Building queries with ad-hoc JOINs

Searching for all items that match search terms

Implementing a custom find type

Paginating a custom find type

Implementing AJAX based pagination

Validation and Behaviors

Introduction

Adding multiple validation rules

Creating a custom validation rule

Using callbacks in behaviors

Using behaviors to add new fields for saving

Using the Sluggable behavior

Geocoding addresses with the Geocodable behavior

Datasources

Introduction

Improving the SQL datasource query log

Parsing CSV files with a datasource

Consuming RSS feeds with a datasource

Building a Twitter datasource

Adding transaction and locking support to the MySQL datasource

Routing Magic

Introduction

Using named and GET parameters

Using routes with prefixes

Working with route elements

Adding catch-all routes for profile pages

Adding validation for catch-all routes

Creating custom Route classes

Creating and Consuming Web Services

Introduction

Creating an RSS feed

Consuming a JSON service

Building REST services with JSON

Adding authentication to REST services

Implementing token-based authorization for API access

Working with Shells

Introduction

Building and running a shell

Parsing command line parameters

Creating reusable shell tasks

Sending e-mails from shells

Non-interactive tasks with the robot plugin

Internationalizing Applications

Introduction

Internationalizing controller and view texts

Internationalizing model validation messages

Translating strings with dynamic content

Setting and remembering the language

Testing

Introduction

Setting up the test framework

Creating fixtures and testing model methods

Testing controller actions and their views

Using mocks to test controllers

Running tests from the command line

Utility Classes and Tools

Introduction

Working with the Set class

Manipulating strings with the String class

Sending an e-mail

Detecting file types with MagicDb

Throwing and handling exceptions

Customer Reviews

5 star

4 star

3 star

2 star

1 star

Allowing logins with username or e-mail

By default the Auth component will use the given username posted in the login form to check for a valid user account. However, some applications have two separate fields: one to define the username, and another one to define the user's e-mail. This recipe shows how to allow logins using either a username or an e-mail.

Getting ready

We should have a fully working authentication system, so follow the entire recipe, Setting up a basic authentication system.

We also need the field to hold the user's e-mail address. Add a field named email to your users table with the following SQL statement:

ALTER TABLE `users`
ADD COLUMN `email` VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL;

We need to modify the signup page so users can specify their e-mail address. Edit your app/views/users/add.ctp file and make the following changes:

<?php
echo $this->Form->create();
echo $this->Form->inputs(array(
'legend' => 'Signup',
'email',
'username',
'password'
));
echo $this->Form->end('Submit');
?>

How to do it...

1. Edit your app/views/users/login.ctp file and make the following changes to it:

<?php
echo $this->Form->create(array('action'=>'login'));
echo $this->Form->inputs(array(
'legend' => 'Login',
'username' => array('label'=>'Username / Email'),
'password'
));
echo $this->Form->end('Login');
?>

2. Edit your UsersController class and make sure the login action looks like the following:

public function login() {
if (
!empty($this->data) &&
!empty($this->Auth->data['User']['username']) &&
!empty($this->Auth->data['User']['password'])
) {
$user = $this->User->find('first', array(
'conditions' => array(
'User.email' => $this->Auth->data['User']['username'],
'User.password' => $this->Auth->data['User']['password']
),
'recursive' => -1
));
if (!empty($user) && $this->Auth->login($user)) {
if ($this->Auth->autoRedirect) {
$this->redirect($this->Auth->redirect());
}
} else {
$this->Session->setFlash($this->Auth->loginError, $this->Auth->flashElement, array(), 'auth');
}
}
}

If you now browse to http://localhost/users/login and you can enter the user's e-mail and password to log in, as shown in the following screenshot:

How it works...

When the Auth component is unable to find a valid user account using the username and password fields, it gives the control back to the login action. Therefore, in the login action we can check if there is any submitted data. If that is the case, we know that the Auth component was not able to find a valid account.

With this in mind, we can try to find a user account with an e-mail that matches the given username. If there is one, we log the user in and redirect the browser to the default action, similar to what the component would do on a successful attempt.

If we cannot find a valid user account, we simply set the flash message to the default error message specified in the Auth component.

There's more...

You may have noticed that when looking for the user record, we used $this->Auth->data rather than $this->data to use the actual posted values. The reason for this is because the Auth component will not only automatically hash the password field, but also remove its value from the controller's data property, so if you need to show the login form again, the password field will not be pre-filled for the user.

CakePHP 1.3 Application Development Cookbook

CakePHP 1.3 Application Development Cookbook

Overview of this book

Related Content you might be interested in

Current Title:

CakePHP 1.3 Application Development Cookbook

Allowing logins with username or e-mail

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

There's more...

See also