Book Image

Yii Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition - Second Edition

Book Image

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.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Yii Application Development Cookbook Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Working with JSON


JSON is a very simple, compact, and therefore widely used format for AJAX application's data exchange. Yii has a few handy ways to work with it. Therefore, let's create a simple application that will show a news list and update it every two seconds.

Getting ready

  1. Create a new application by using the yiic webapp tool.

  2. Create and set up a new database.

  3. Add a table named news with at least id, created_on, and title fields, as shown in the following code:

    CREATE TABLE `news` (`id` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,`created_on` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL,`title` varchar(255) NOT NULL,PRIMARY KEY (`id`))
  4. Generate a News model using Gii.

How to do it...

  1. Create a new controller named protected/controllers/NewsController.php as follows:

    <?php
    class NewsController extends Controller
    {
       public function filters()
       {
          return array(
             'ajaxOnly + data',
          );
       }
    
       public function actionIndex()
       {
          $this->render('index');
       }
    
       public function actionData...