Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook

Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook

Overview of this book

When Alex told me he was about to write a Yii cookbook about a year ago, I was wondering how original it would be, considering the fact that there was already an online user-contributed cookbook (aka. Yii wiki). It turned out Alex produced a book that is not only full of wisdom about how to use Yii effectively, but also presented in such a systematic way that it can be taken as an essential companion book to the definitive guide to Yii. In fact, Alex has successfully intrigued the interest of every member in the Yii developer team when he asked for review and comments on his newly finished book chapters.As the founder and the lead developer of the Yii framework, I feel this book is a must-read for every Yii programmer. While this book does not describe directly the rules set by Yii, it shows how to program with Yii from a practical perspective. People who are driven by tight project schedules will find this book very handy as it gives ready-to-use solutions to many problems they may face in their projects; people who are already familiar with Yii will also find this book very informative as most problem solutions given in the book can be considered as officially recommended because they have undergone thorough review of every Yii developer team member. Alex, through this book and his active participation in the Yii project, proved himself to be a great programmer as well as a good writer. Qiang XueLead developer of the Yii framework Yii framework is a rapidly growing PHP5 MVC framework often referred to as Rails for PHP. It has become a solid base for many exciting web applications such as Stay.com and Russia Today's meetfriends.rt.com and can be a good base for your developments. Yii is an object-oriented, high-performance, component-based PHP web application framework. Yii is pronounced as Yee and is an acronym for "Yes It Is!". Familiar with Yii and want to exploit it to its full potential, but do not know how to go about it? Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook will show you how to use Yii efficiently. You will learn about implementing shortcuts using core features, creating your own reusable code base, using test-driven development, and many more topics that will escalate your knowledge in no time at all! Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook will help you learn more about Yii framework and application development practices in general with demonstrations of shortcuts and information about dangerous things you should not do. Grouped in 13 chapters, the recipes will assist you to write your applications exploiting Yii core functionality to its full potential. The chapters are generally independent of each other and you can start reading from the chapter you need most, whether it is "AJAX and jQuery", "Database, Active Record and Model Tricks" or "Extending Yii". The most interesting topics include Yii application deployment, a guide to writing your own extensions, advanced error handling, debugging and logging, application security, and performance tuning. Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook will help you utilize Yii functionalities completely and efficiently.

Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook

Credits

Foreword

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 request

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 base controller

Using external actions

Displaying static pages with CViewAction

Using flash messages

Using 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 into the page

Working with JSON

Passing configuration from PHP to JavaScript

Handling variable number of inputs

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 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 sessions handling

Using cache dependencies and chains

Profiling an application with Yii

Using External Code

Introduction

Using Zend Framework from Yii

Customizing the Yii autoloader

Using Kohana inside Yii

Using PEAR inside Yii

Deployment

Introduction

Changing the Yii directories 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 Yii core collections

Yii has a set of collection classes used mainly for internal purposes which are not described in the Definitive Guide, but are still very useful for applications:

Lists: CList, CTypedList
Maps: CMap, CAttributeCollection
Queue: CQueue
Stack: CStack

How to do it…

All collections implement SPL IteratorAggregate, Traversable, and Countable. Lists and maps also implement SPL ArrayAccess. It allows using collections like a standard PHP construct. The following is a snippet from the CList API:

The following is the snippet from CList API:

// append at the end
$list[]=$item;

// $index must be between 0 and $list->Count
$list[$index]=$item;

// remove the item at $index
unset($list[$index]);


// if the list has an item at $index
if(isset($list[$index]))

// traverse each item in the list
foreach($list as $index=>$item)

// returns the number of items in the list
$n=count($list);

CList is an integer-indexed collection. Compared to the native PHP array, it adds stricter checks, can be used in OO fashion, and allows to make a collection read-only:

$list = new CList();
$list->add('python');
$list->add('php');
$list->add('java')

if($list->contains('php'))
   $list->remove('java');

$anotherList = new CList(array('python', 'ruby'));
$list->mergeWith($anotherList);

$list->setReadOnly(true);

print_r($list->toArray());

There is another list collection named CTypedList that ensures that the list contains only items of a certain type:
```
$typedList = new CTypedList('Post');
$typedList->add(new Post());
$typedList->add(new Comment());
```
As we are trying to add a comment to a posts list, the preceding code will give you the following exception:
```
CTypedList<Post> can only hold objects of Post class.
```
CMap allows using every value, integer or not, as a key. Just like in CList, it can also be used in the native PHP style, has almost the same set of OO-methods, and allows making a collection read only:
```
$map = new CMap();
$map->add('php', array('facebook', 'wikipedia', 'wordpress', 'drupal'));
$map->add('ruby', array('basecamp', 'twitter'));
print_r($map->getKeys());
```

There is also one handy static method named CMap::mergeArray that can be used to recursively merge two associative arrays while replacing scalar values:

$apps1 = array(
    'apps' => array(
        'task tracking',
        'bug tracking',
    ),
    'is_new' => false
);

$apps2 = array(
    'apps' => array(
        'blog',
        'task tracking',
    ),
    'todo' => array(
        'buy milk',
    ),
    'is_new' => true
);

$apps = CMap::mergeArray($apps1, $apps2);
CVarDumper::dump($apps, 10, true);

The result of the preceding code is as follows:

array
(
    'apps' => array
    (
        '0' => 'task tracking'
        '1' => 'bug tracking'
        '2' => 'blog'
        '3' => 'task tracking'
    )
    'is_new' => true
    'todo' => array
    (
        '0' => 'buy milk'
    )
)

CAttributeCollection includes all CMap functionality and can work with data just like properties:

$col = new CAttributeCollection();

// $col->add('name','Alexander');
$col->name='Alexander';

// echo $col->itemAt('name');
echo $col->name;

CQueue and CStack implement a queue and a stack respectively. A stack works as LIFO: last in, first out, and the queue is FIFO: first in, first out. Same as list and map collections these can be used in native PHP style and have OO style methods:

$queue = new CQueue();

// add some tasks
$queue->enqueue(new Task('buy milk'));
$queue->enqueue(new Task('feed a cat'));
$queue->enqueue(new Task('write yii cookbook'));

// complete a task (remove from queue and return it)
echo 'Done with '.$queue->dequeue();
echo count($queue).' items left.';
// return next item without removing it
echo 'Next one is '.$queue->peek();

foreach($queue as $task)
   print_r($task);

$garage = new CStack();

// getting some cars into the garage
$garage->push(new Car('Ferrari'));
$garage->push(new Car('Porsche'));
$garage->push(new Car('Kamaz'));

// Ferrari and Porsche can't get out
// since there is…
echo $garage->peek(); // Kamaz!

// we need to get Kamaz out first
$garage->pop();

$porsche = $garage->pop();
$porsche->drive();

Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook

Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook

Overview of this book

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Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook

Using Yii core collections

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