Book Image

CakePHP 1.3 Application Development Cookbook

Book Image

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.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
CakePHP 1.3 Application Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Adding authentication to REST services


In the previous recipe, Building REST services with JSON, we learnt how to enable JSON access to our actions, including the ability to create, modify, or delete posts with a simple JSON request.

Modification of data through REST requests can lead to sensitive data loss if we don't add some sort of authentication. This recipe shows us how to enforce that our data-changing REST services are only utilized by valid users using HTTP Basic Authentication.

Getting ready

To go through this recipe, we need some JSON-based REST services implemented. Follow the entire recipe Building REST services with JSON.

We also need a working authentication for our application. Follow the entire recipe Setting up a basic authentication system in the Authentication chapter.

How to do it...

Edit your app/controller/posts_controller.php file and make the following changes to the beforeFilter callback:

public function beforeFilter() {
parent::beforeFilter();
if ($this->_isJSON(...