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

Data providers and data widgets


In Yii2, data providers are helper classes that are used to extract data via Query Builder to be passed to a data widget. The benefit of using data providers and data widgets over queries built via Query Builder is that they provide an interface to automatically deal with sorting and pagination.

The most common way to work with data providers is to use the yii\data\ActiveDataProvider class. Typically, yii\data\ActiveDataProvider will be used with Active Record models:

$provider = new ActiveDataProvider([
    'query' => User::find(),
    'pagination' => [
        'pageSize' => 20,
    ],
]);

Tip

We'll cover how to create and use Active Record and models in Chapter 4, Active Record, Models, and Forms.

Active data providers can also be populated through Query Builder, as shown in the following example:

$query = new yii\db\Query();
$provider = new ActiveDataProvider([
    'query' => $query->from('user'),
    'pagination' => [
        'pageSize' =&gt...