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

Working with requests

You can work with request data directly using PHP superglobals such as $_SERVER, $_GET, or $_POST but the better way is to use Yii's powerful CHttpRequest class that resolves inconsistencies among different web servers, manages cookies, provides some additional security, and has a nice set of OO methods.

How to do it…

You can access the request component in your web application by using Yii::app()->getRequest(). So, let's review the most useful methods and their usage, methods that return different parts of the current URL. In the following table, the returned parts are marked with a bold font.

Methods	Results
`getUrl`	`http://cookbook.local`/test/index?var=val
`getHostInfo`	http://cookbook.local`/test/index?var=val`
`getPathInfo`	`http://cookbook.local/`test/index`?var=val`
`getRequestUri`	`http://cookbook.local`/test/index?var=val
`getQueryString`	`http://cookbook.local/test/index?`var=val

The methods that allow us to ensure the request types are getIsPostRequest, getIsAjaxRequest , and getRequestType .

For example, we can use getIsAjaxRequest to serve different content based on the request type:

class TestController extends CController
{
   public function actionIndex()
   {
      if(Yii::app()->request->isAjaxRequest)
         $this->renderPartial('test');
      else
         $this->render('test');
   }
}

In the preceding code, we are rendering a view without a layout if the request is made through AJAX.

While PHP provides superglobals for both POST and GET, Yii allows us to omit some additional checks:

class TestController extends CController
{
   public function actionIndex()
   {
      $request = Yii::app()->request;

      $param = $request->getParam('id', 1);
      // equals to
      $param = isset($_REQUEST['id']) ? $_REQUEST['id'] : 1;

      $param = $request->getQuery('id');
      // equals to
      $param = isset($_GET['id']) ? $_GET['id'] : null;

      $param = $request->getPost('id', 1);
      // equals to
      $param = isset($_POST['id']) ? $_POST['id'] : 1;
   }
}

getPreferredLanguage tries to determine the user's preferred language. It can't be completely accurate, but it is good to use it as a fallback in case the user has not specified a preferred language manually.

class TestController extends CController
{
   public function actionIndex()
   {
      $request = Yii::app()->request;
      $lang = $request->preferredLanguage;

      // Trying to get language setting from 
      // Settings table that holds id of the user,
      // setting name and setting value.
      $criteria = new CDbCriteria();
      $criteria->compare('user_id', $request->getQuery('userid'));
      $criteria->compare('key', 'language');
      $setting = Settings::model()->find($criteria);
      if($setting)
         $lang = $setting->value;

      Yii::app()->setLanguage($lang);
      
      echo Yii::t('app', 'Language is: ').$lang;
   }
}

sendFile allows us to initiate a file download as follows:
```
class TestController extends CController
{
   public function actionIndex()
   {
   $request = Yii::app()->getRequest();
      $request->sendFile('test.txt', 'File content goes here.');
   }
}
```
This action will trigger a file download and send all necessary headers, including content type (mimetype) and content length. The MIME type, if not set manually as a third parameter, will be guessed based on the filename's extension.

The last thing we are going to show in this chapter is the getCookies method. It returns a CCookieCollection class instance that allows us to work with cookies. As CCookieCollection extends CMap, we can use some native PHP methods as follows:

class TestController extends CController
{
   public function actionIndex()
   {
      $request = Yii::app()->request;
      // getting a cookie
      $cookie = $request->cookies['test'];
      if($cookie)
         // printing cookie value
         echo $cookie->value;      
      else {
         // creating new cookie
         $cookie=new CHttpCookie('test','I am a cookie!');
         $request->cookies['test'] = $cookie;
      }
}

There's more...

If you are working with a lot of cookie values and want to shorten the code provided, then you can use a helper as follows:

class Cookie
{
  public static function get($name)
  {
       $cookie=Yii::app()->request->cookies[$name];
       if(!$cookie)
           return null;

       return $cookie->value;
  }

  public static function set($name, $value, $expiration=0)
  {
       $cookie=new CHttpCookie($name,$value);
       $cookie->expire = $expiration;
       Yii::app()->request->cookies[$name]=$cookie;
  }
}

After you drop this code into protected/components/Cookie.php, you will be able to perform the following:

class TestController extends CController
{
   public function actionIndex()
   {
      $cookie = Cookie::get('test');
      if($cookie)
         echo $cookie;      
      else
         Cookie::set('test','I am a cookie!!');
   }
}

Yii Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition - Second Edition

Yii Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

Related Content you might be interested in

Current Title:

Yii Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition - Second Edition

Working with requests

How to do it…

There's more...