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

Using import and autoloading

When programming with PHP, one of the most annoying things is loading additional code with include and require. Fortunately, you can do it automatically using the SPL class loader (http://php.net/manual/en/function.spl-autoload.php).

Autoloading is one of the features that Yii relies on. Still, there are many questions about it on the forums. Let's get it clear and show how we can use it.

When we use a class, for example, CDbCriteria, we are not including it explicitly so PHP initially cannot find it and tries to rely on the autoloading feature; the SPL autoloader, to be precise. In most cases, the Yii default autoloader (YiiBase::autoload) will be used.

For the sake of speed and simplicity, almost all core framework classes are loaded when needed without including or importing them explicitly. It's done through the YiiBase::$_coreClasses map, so loading core classes is very fast. Zii classes, such as CMenu, extension classes, or your own classes are not loaded automatically, so we need to import them first.

To import classes, we will use Yii::import:

import does not include a class immediately by default
It does not include a class if it is not used
It will not load a class twice, so it is safe to import the same class multiple times

How to do it...

Let's assume that we have a custom class named LyricsFinder that finds lyrics for a given song. We have put it under protected/apis/lyrics/ and in our protected/controllers/TestController.php. We are trying to use it in the following way:

class TestController extends CController
{
   public function actionIndex($song)
   {
      $lyric = 'Nothing was found.';
      $finder = new LyricsFinder();

      if(!empty($song))
         $lyric = $finder->getText($song);

      echo $lyric;
   }
}

When executing it, we will get the following PHP error:

include(LyricsFinder.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory.

Yii helps us there a bit because at the error screen, we can see that the autoloader fails because it doesn't know where to look for our class. Therefore, let's modify our code:
```
class TestController extends CController
{
   public function actionIndex($song)
   {
      $lyric = 'Nothing was found.';
      
      // importing a class
      Yii::import('application.apis.lyrics.LyricsFinder');
      $finder = new LyricsFinder();

      if(!empty($song))
         $lyric = $finder->getText($song);

      echo $lyric;
   }
}
```
Now our code works.
Note
The built-in Yii class loader requires that each class should be placed into a separate file named the same as the class itself. When developing using case insensitive filesystems such as ones used by Windows, make sure you're using the same case in both the filename and code since it can be a problem when you deploy your code to a case sensitive Linux server.

How it works...

Let's look at application.apis.lyrics.LyricsFinder.

application is a standard alias that points to your application's protected folder and is translated into a filesystem path. The following table shows some more standard aliases:

Alias	Path
`application`	`path_to_webroot/protected`
`system`	`path_to_webroot/framework`
`zii`	`path_to_webroot/framework/zii`
`webroot`	`path_to_webroot`
`ext`	`path_to_webroot/protected/extensions`

Note

You can define your own aliases using the Yii::setPathOfAlias method. Typically, it can be done as the first lines of protected/config/main.php, so all other config parts will be able to use these new aliases.

apis.lyrics are translated to apis/lyrics and are appended to a path retrieved from the application alias, and LyricsFinder is the class name we want to import.

If LyricsFinder requires some additional classes located in its directory, then we can use Yii::import('application.apis.lyrics.*') to import the whole directory. Note that * does not include subfolders, so if you need lyrics/includes, you should add another import statement: Yii::import('application.apis.lyrics.includes.*').

For performance reasons, it is better to use explicit paths with a class name instead of * if you are importing a single class.

There's more...

If you want your classes to be imported automatically like with Yii's core classes, then you can configure global imports in your main.php configuration file:

return array(
   // …

   // global imports
   'import'=>array(
      'application.models.*',
      'application.components.*',
      'application.apis.lyrics.*',
      'application.apis.lyrics.includes.*',
      'application.apis.albums.AlbumFinder',
   ),

Note that using *, with a huge amount of global imports could slow your application down as there will be too many directories to check.

Tip

Downloading the example code

To get the example code files for this book visit http://yiicookbook.org/code.

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

Using import and autoloading

How to do it...

Note

How it works...

Note

There's more...

Tip