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

Using prefixes for role-based access control

Even though CakePHP provides a very powerful access control layer, sometimes we just need to implement user roles without having to go into the details of specifying which role is allowed access to which action.

This recipe shows how to limit access to certain actions by role-using routing prefixes, which constitutes a perfect solution for simple role-based authentication. In order to accomplish this recipe, we will assume the need to add three user roles in our application: administrators, managers, and users.

Getting ready

We should have a working authentication system, so follow the recipe, Setting up a basic authentication system. The users table should also contain a field to hold the user's role (named role.) Add this field with the following SQL statement:

ALTER TABLE `users`
ADD COLUMN `role` VARCHAR(255) DEFAULT NULL AFTER `password`;

How to do it...

1. Edit your app/config/core.php file and look for the line that defines the Routing.prefixes setting. If it is commented out, uncomment it. Then change it to:
```
Configure::write('Routing.prefixes', array('admin', 'manager'));
```

2. Add the following code at the end of your UsersController class definition:

public function dashboard() {
$role = $this->Auth->user('role');
if (!empty($role)) {
$this->redirect(array($role => true, 'action' => 'dashboard'));
}
}
public function admin_dashboard() {
}
public function manager_dashboard() {
}

3. Create a view for each of these actions, and put content into it to reflect which view is being rendered. Therefore, you would have to create three files:
- app/views/users/admin_dashboard.ctp
- app/views/users/manager_dashboard.ctp
- app/views/users/dashboard.ctp
For example, the contents for dashboard.ctp could simply be:
```
<h1>Dashboard (User)</h1>
```

4. Edit your app/controllers/app_controller.php file and change the components property declaration to include the following setting for the Auth component:

public $components = array(
'Auth' => array(
'authorize' => 'controller',
'loginRedirect' => array(
'admin' => false,
'controller' => 'users',
'action' => 'dashboard'
)
),
'Session'
);

5. While still editing your AppController class, change the isAuthorized method and replace it entirely with the following:

public function isAuthorized() {
$role = $this->Auth->user('role');
$neededRole = null;
$prefix = !empty($this->params['prefix']) ?
$this->params['prefix'] :
null;
if (
!empty($prefix) &&
in_array($prefix, Configure::read('Routing.prefixes'))
) {
$neededRole = $prefix;
}
return (
empty($neededRole) ||
strcasecmp($role, 'admin') == 0 ||
strcasecmp($role, $neededRole) == 0
);
}

6. Copy the default CakePHP layout file named default.ctp from your cake/libs/view/layouts folder to your application's app/views/layouts folder. While editing this layout, place the following code in the app/views/layouts/default.ctp layout file, right where you want the link to the dashboard to appear.
```
<?php
$dashboardUrl = array('controller'=>'users', 'action'=>'dashboard');
if (!empty($user['role'])) {
$dashboardUrl[$user['role']] = true;
}
echo $this->Html->link('My Dashboard', $dashboardUrl);
?>
```

How it works...

CakePHP will recognize prefixes defined in the Routing.prefixes setting as part of the URL, when they are preceding a normal route. For example, if admin is a defined prefix, the route /admin/articles/index will translate to the admin_index action in ArticlesController.

Since we are utilizing the controller authentication scheme in the Auth configuration, we know that every time a user is trying to access a non-public action, AppController::isAuthorized() is executed, and inside the method we set true if the user has access, or false otherwise.

Knowing that, we can check to see if a prefix is being used when a controller action is about to be executed. If the current route being accessed includes a prefix, we can match that prefix against the user's role to make sure they have access to the requested resource.

We are able to link to a role-only resource just by prefixing it with the appropriate prefix in the route. For example, to link to the manager's dashboard, the URL would be:

array(
'manager' => true,
'controller' => 'users',
'action' => 'dashboard'
);

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

Using prefixes for role-based access control

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also