Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook

Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook

Overview of this book

When Alex told me he was about to write a Yii cookbook about a year ago, I was wondering how original it would be, considering the fact that there was already an online user-contributed cookbook (aka. Yii wiki). It turned out Alex produced a book that is not only full of wisdom about how to use Yii effectively, but also presented in such a systematic way that it can be taken as an essential companion book to the definitive guide to Yii. In fact, Alex has successfully intrigued the interest of every member in the Yii developer team when he asked for review and comments on his newly finished book chapters.As the founder and the lead developer of the Yii framework, I feel this book is a must-read for every Yii programmer. While this book does not describe directly the rules set by Yii, it shows how to program with Yii from a practical perspective. People who are driven by tight project schedules will find this book very handy as it gives ready-to-use solutions to many problems they may face in their projects; people who are already familiar with Yii will also find this book very informative as most problem solutions given in the book can be considered as officially recommended because they have undergone thorough review of every Yii developer team member. Alex, through this book and his active participation in the Yii project, proved himself to be a great programmer as well as a good writer. Qiang XueLead developer of the Yii framework Yii framework is a rapidly growing PHP5 MVC framework often referred to as Rails for PHP. It has become a solid base for many exciting web applications such as Stay.com and Russia Today's meetfriends.rt.com and can be a good base for your developments. Yii is an object-oriented, high-performance, component-based PHP web application framework. Yii is pronounced as Yee and is an acronym for "Yes It Is!". Familiar with Yii and want to exploit it to its full potential, but do not know how to go about it? Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook will show you how to use Yii efficiently. You will learn about implementing shortcuts using core features, creating your own reusable code base, using test-driven development, and many more topics that will escalate your knowledge in no time at all! Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook will help you learn more about Yii framework and application development practices in general with demonstrations of shortcuts and information about dangerous things you should not do. Grouped in 13 chapters, the recipes will assist you to write your applications exploiting Yii core functionality to its full potential. The chapters are generally independent of each other and you can start reading from the chapter you need most, whether it is "AJAX and jQuery", "Database, Active Record and Model Tricks" or "Extending Yii". The most interesting topics include Yii application deployment, a guide to writing your own extensions, advanced error handling, debugging and logging, application security, and performance tuning. Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook will help you utilize Yii functionalities completely and efficiently.

Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook

Credits

Foreword

About the Author

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

Under the Hood

Introduction

Using getters and setters

Using Yii events

Using import and autoloading

Using exceptions

Configuring components

Configuring widget defaults

Using Yii core collections

Working with request

Router, Controller, and Views

Introduction

Configuring URL rules

Generating URLs by path

Using regular expressions in URL rules

Creating URL rules for static pages

Providing your own URL rules at runtime

Using base controller

Using external actions

Displaying static pages with CViewAction

Using flash messages

Using controller context in a view

Reusing views with partials

Using clips

Using decorators

Defining multiple layouts

Paginating and sorting data

AJAX and jQuery

Introduction

Loading a block through AJAX

Managing assets

Including resources into the page

Working with JSON

Passing configuration from PHP to JavaScript

Handling variable number of inputs

Working with Forms

Introduction

Writing your own validators

Uploading files

Adding CAPTCHA

Customizing CAPTCHA

Creating a custom input widget with CInputWidget

Testing your Application

Introduction

Setting up the testing environment

Writing and running unit tests

Using fixtures

Testing the application with functional tests

Generating code coverage reports

Database, Active Record, and Model Tricks

Introduction

Getting data from a database

Defining and using multiple DB connections

Using scopes to get models for different languages

Processing model fields with AR event-like methods

Applying markdown and HTML

Highlighting code with Yii

Automating timestamps

Setting an author automatically

Implementing single table inheritance

Using Zii Components

Creating custom grid columns

Extending Yii

Introduction

Creating model behaviors

Creating components

Creating reusable controller actions

Creating reusable controllers

Creating a widget

Creating CLI commands

Creating filters

Creating modules

Creating a custom view renderer

Making extensions distribution-ready

Error handling, Debugging, and Logging

Introduction

Using different log routes

Analyzing the Yii error stack trace

Logging and using the context information

Implementing your own smart 404 handler

Security

Introduction

Using controller filters

Using CHtml and CHtmlPurifier to prevent XSS

Preventing SQL injections

Preventing CSRF

Using RBAC

Performance Tuning

Introduction

Following best practices

Speeding up sessions handling

Using cache dependencies and chains

Profiling an application with Yii

Using External Code

Introduction

Using Zend Framework from Yii

Customizing the Yii autoloader

Using Kohana inside Yii

Using PEAR inside Yii

Deployment

Introduction

Changing the Yii directories layout

Moving an application out of webroot

Sharing the framework directory

Moving configuration parts into separate files

Using multiple configurations to simplify the deployment

Implementing and executing cron jobs

Maintenance mode

Index

Customer Reviews

5 star

4 star

3 star

2 star

1 star

Configuring components

Yii is a very customizable framework. Moreover, as in every customizable code, there should be a convenient way to setup different application parts. So in Yii, this is provided through a configuration file named main.php located at protected/config/.

How to do it…

If you have worked with Yii before, then you have probably configured a database connection:

return array(
   …
   'components'=>array(
      'db'=>array(
         'class'=>'system.db.CDbConnection',
         'connectionString'=>'mysql:host=localhost;dbname=database_name',
         'username'=>'root',
         'password'=>'',
         'charset'=>'utf8',
      ),
      …
   ),
   …
);

This way of configuring component is used when you want to use a component across all application parts. With the preceding configuration, you can access a component by its name, such as Yii::app()->db.

How it works…

When you are using the Yii::app()->db component for the first time directly or through active record model, Yii creates a component and initializes its public properties with the corresponding values provided in db array under the components section of the main.php application configuration file. In the preceding code, 'connectionString' the value will be assigned to CDbConnection::connectionString, 'username' will be assigned to CDbConnection::username, and so on.

If you want to find out what 'charset' stands for or want to know what else you can configure in the db component, then you need to know its class. In case of db component, the class is CDbConnection. You can refer to its API page at http://www.yiiframework.com/doc/api/CDbConnection/ and look for its public properties you can set from config.

In the preceding code, the 'class' property is a bit special because it is used to specify component class name. It does not exist in the CDbConnection class. Therefore, it can be used to override a class as follows:

return array(
   …
   'components'=>array(
      'db'=>array(
         'class'=>'application.components.MyDbConnection',
         …
      ),
      …
   ),
   …
);

This way, you can override each application component and it is very useful whenever a standard component does not fit your application.

There's more...

Now, let's find out which standard Yii application components you can configure. There are two application types bundled with Yii which are as follows:

Web application (CWebApplication)
Console application (CConsoleApplication)

Both are extended from CApplication, so both console and web applications are sharing its components.

You can get the component names from API pages (http://www.yiiframework.com/doc/api/) and the source code of the registerCoreComponents application method, but let's list them here so the list can be used as a reference.

Both console and web application components are listed in the following table:

Component name	Default/suggested component class	Description
`coreMessages`	`CPhpMessageSource`	This component provides the source for translating Yii framework messages.
`db`	`CDbConnection`	This component provides a database connection.
`messages`	`CPhpMessageSource`	This component provides the source for translating application messages.
`errorHandler`	`CErrorHandler`	This component handles PHP errors and uncaught exceptions.
`securityManager`	`CSecurityManager`	This component provides security-related services, such as hashing, encryption, and so on.
`statePersister`	`CStatePersister`	This component provides global state persistence methods.
`format`	`CFormatter`	This component provides a set of commonly used data formatting methods.
`cache`	`CFileCache`	This component provides a caching feature.

Additional components available only for web application are listed in the following table:

Component name	Default component class	Description
`session`	`CHttpSession`	This component provides the session-related functionalities.
`request`	`CHttpRequest`	This component encapsulates the `$_SERVER` variable and resolves its inconsistency among different web servers. It also manages the cookies sent from and to the user.
`urlManager`	`CUrlManager`	URL router; used both to generate and resolve application URLs.
`assetManager`	`CAssetManager`	This component manages the publishing of private asset files.
`user`	`CWebUser`	This component represents the user session information.
`themeManager`	`CThemeManager`	This component manages themes.
`authManager`	`CPhpAuthManager`	This component manages role-based access control (RBAC).
`clientScript`	`CClientScript`	This component manages client scripts (JavaScript and CSS).
`widgetFactory`	`CWidgetFactory`	This component creates widgets and supports widget skinning.

You can add your own application components (classes extended from CComponent) by simply adding new configuration items and pointing their class properties to your custom classes.

Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook

Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook

Overview of this book

Related Content you might be interested in

Current Title:

Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook

Configuring components

How to do it…

How it works…

There's more...

See also