Yii Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition

Yii Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

The Yii framework is a rapidly growing PHP5 MVC framework often referred to as Rails for PHP. It has already become a solid base for many exciting web applications such as Stay.com and can be a good base for your developments, too. This book will help you to learn Yii quickly and in more depth for use in for your developments."Yii Application Development Cookbook" will show you how to use Yii efficiently. You will learn about taking shortcuts using core features, creating your own reusable code base, using test driven development, and many more topics that will give you a lot of experience in a moderate amount of time.The second edition fixes all errata found in the first edition and also features new recipes on the client side, HTTP caching, and using Composer with Yii.The chapters of the book are generally independent and since this book's goal is to enhance a practical approach to Yii development, you can start reading from the chapter you need most, be it Ajax and jQuery, Database, Active Record, and Model Tricks, or Extending Yii."Yii Application Development Cookbook" will help you to learn more about the Yii framework and application development practices in general, showing shortcuts and dangerous things you shouldn't do.With all the recipes grouped in 13 chapters, you will write your applications more efficiently using shortcuts and using Yii core functionality in a good way. The most interesting topics are; Yii application deployment, a guide to writing your own extensions, advanced error handling, debugging and logging, application security, performance tuning, and much more."Yii Application Development Cookbook" will help you to learn more about the Yii framework and application development practices in general. You will write your applications more efficiently using shortcuts and using Yii core functionality in a good way.

Yii Application Development Cookbook Second Edition

Credits

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 requests

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 a base controller

Using external actions

Displaying static pages with CViewAction

Using flash messages

Using the 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 in the page

Working with JSON

Passing configuration from PHP to JavaScript

Handling variable number of inputs

Rendering content at the client side

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 up 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 session handling

Using cache dependencies and chains

Profiling an application with Yii

Leveraging HTTP caching

Using External Code

Introduction

Using Zend Framework from Yii

Customizing the Yii autoloader

Using Kohana inside Yii

Using PEAR inside Yii

Using Composer with Yii

Deployment

Introduction

Changing the Yii directory 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 set up 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 a 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 the Active Record model, Yii creates a component and initializes its public properties with the corresponding values provided in the db array under the components section of the main.php application configuration file. In the preceding code, the 'connectionString' value will be assigned to CDbConnection::connectionString, the 'username' value 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 the 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 that you can set from config.

In the preceding code, the 'class' property is a bit special because it is used to specify the component's 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's 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 that it 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 for both generating and resolving application URLs.
`assetManager`	`CAssetManager`	This component manages the publishing of private asset files.
`user`	`CWebUser`	This component represents the user's 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 Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition - Second Edition

Yii Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

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Current Title:

Yii Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition - Second Edition

Configuring components

How to do it…

How it works…

There's more...