Book Image

Mastering Yii

By : Charles R. Portwood ll
Book Image

Mastering Yii

By: Charles R. Portwood ll

Overview of this book

The successor of Yii Framework 1.1, Yii 2 is a complete rewrite of Yii Framework, one of the most popular PHP 5 frameworks around for making modern web applications. The update embraces the best practices and protocols established with newer versions of PHP, while still maintaining the simple, fast, and extendable behavior found in its predecessor. This book has been written to enhance your skills and knowledge with Yii Framework 2. Starting with configuration and how to initialize new projects, you’ll learn how to configure, manage, and use every aspect of Yii2 from Gii, DAO, Query Builder, Active Record, and migrations, to asset manager. You'll also discover how to automatically test your code using codeception. With this book by your side, you’ll have all the skills you need to quickly create rich modern web and console applications with Yii 2.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Mastering Yii
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
5
Modules, Widgets, and Helpers
13
Debugging and Deploying
Index

Forms


In Yii2, we can dynamically generate rich HTML5 forms based upon our model using the yii/widgets/ActiveForm class. The yii/widgets/ActiveForm class has several advantages over managing forms manually. In addition to providing several useful helper methods and pairing well with the HTML helper yii/helpers/Html, forms can be generated from the Gii tool using our model data. When working with models and active record instances, this is the preferred way to generate forms.

Generating forms with Gii

Like Active Record classes, forms can be generated automatically for us from both the web Gii tool and the console Gii tool. Let's take a look at generating a form for authentication, which we'll call LoginForm, and a form to handle registration, which we'll call RegisterForm.

Generating forms with Gii's web interface

For our LoginForm form, let's start by opening up the Gii web tool by navigating to the /gii endpoint of our application and then clicking on the Start button underneath the Form Generator...