CakePHP 1.3 Application Development Cookbook

CakePHP 1.3 Application Development Cookbook

Overview of this book

CakePHP is a rapid development framework for PHP that provides an extensible architecture for developing, maintaining, and deploying web applications. While the framework has a lot of documentation and reference guides available for beginners, developing more sophisticated and scalable applications require a deeper knowledge of CakePHP features, a challenge that proves difficult even for well established developers.The recipes in this cookbook will give you instant results and help you to develop web applications, leveraging the CakePHP features that allow you to build robust and complex applications. Following the recipes in this book you will be able to understand and use these features in no time. We start with setting up authentication on a CakePHP application. One of the most important aspects of a CakePHP application: the relationship between models, also known as model bindings. Model binding is an integral part of any application's logic and we can manipulate it to get the data we need and when we need. We will go through a series of recipes that will show us how to change the way bindings are fetched, what bindings and what information from a binding is returned, how to create new bindings, and how to build hierarchical data structures. We also define our custom find types that will extend the three basic ones, allowing our code to be even more readable and also create our own find type, with pagination support. This book also has recipes that cover two aspects of CakePHP models that are fundamental to most applications: validation, and behaviors.

CakePHP 1.3 Application Development Cookbook

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

Authentication

Introduction

Setting up a basic authentication system

Using and configuring the Auth component

Allowing logins with username or e-mail

Saving the user details after login

Getting the current user's information

Using prefixes for role-based access control

Setting up Access Control Layer-based authentication

Integrating with OpenID

Model Bindings

Introduction

Adding Containable to all models

Limiting the bindings returned in a find

Modifying binding parameters for a find

Modifying binding conditions for a find

Changing the JOIN type of one-to-one associations

Defining multiple associations to the same model

Adding bindings on the fly

Pushing the Search

Introduction

Performing GROUP and COUNT queries

Using virtual fields

Building queries with ad-hoc JOINs

Searching for all items that match search terms

Implementing a custom find type

Paginating a custom find type

Implementing AJAX based pagination

Validation and Behaviors

Introduction

Adding multiple validation rules

Creating a custom validation rule

Using callbacks in behaviors

Using behaviors to add new fields for saving

Using the Sluggable behavior

Geocoding addresses with the Geocodable behavior

Datasources

Introduction

Improving the SQL datasource query log

Parsing CSV files with a datasource

Consuming RSS feeds with a datasource

Building a Twitter datasource

Adding transaction and locking support to the MySQL datasource

Routing Magic

Introduction

Using named and GET parameters

Using routes with prefixes

Working with route elements

Adding catch-all routes for profile pages

Adding validation for catch-all routes

Creating custom Route classes

Creating and Consuming Web Services

Introduction

Creating an RSS feed

Consuming a JSON service

Building REST services with JSON

Adding authentication to REST services

Implementing token-based authorization for API access

Working with Shells

Introduction

Building and running a shell

Parsing command line parameters

Creating reusable shell tasks

Sending e-mails from shells

Non-interactive tasks with the robot plugin

Internationalizing Applications

Introduction

Internationalizing controller and view texts

Internationalizing model validation messages

Translating strings with dynamic content

Setting and remembering the language

Testing

Introduction

Setting up the test framework

Creating fixtures and testing model methods

Testing controller actions and their views

Using mocks to test controllers

Running tests from the command line

Utility Classes and Tools

Introduction

Working with the Set class

Manipulating strings with the String class

Sending an e-mail

Detecting file types with MagicDb

Throwing and handling exceptions

Customer Reviews

5 star

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Getting the current user's information

CakePHP's authentication system will provide us with the necessary tools to build a strong, flexible Auth based application. We can then use it to fetch the current user information and make it available throughout our application.

In this recipe, we will see how to save the current logged-in user's information so it is accessible from any point of our CakePHP application, including its layout, while adding a helpful method to the User model to make the job easier.

Getting ready

We should have a working authentication system, so follow the recipe, Setting up a basic authentication system.

How to do it...

1. Add the following method to your AppController class:

public function beforeFilter() {
$user = $this->Auth->user();
if (!empty($user)) {
Configure::write('User', $user[$this->Auth->getModel()->alias]);
}
}

2. Also in your AppController class, add the following method inside the class definition:

public function beforeRender() {
$user = $this->Auth->user();
if (!empty($user)) {
$user = $user[$this->Auth->getModel()->alias];
}
$this->set(compact('user'));
}

3. Copy the default CakePHP layout file named default.ctp from your cake/libs/view/layouts folder to your application's app/views/layouts folder. Place the following code in the app/views/layouts/default.ctp folder. While editing this layout, add the following code right where you want login / logout links to appear:

<?php if (!empty($user)) { ?>
Welcome back <?php echo $user['username']; ?>!
<?php
echo $this->Html->link('Log out', array('plugin'=>null, 'admin'=>false, 'controller'=>'users', 'action'=>'logout'));
} else {
echo $this->Html->link('Log in', array('plugin'=>null, 'admin'=>false, 'controller'=>'users', 'action'=>'login'));
}
?>

4. Add the following method to the User model. If you do not have a model created for the users table, proceed to create a file named user.php and place it in your app/models directory. If you do have one already, make sure you add the get method to it:

<?php
class User extends AppModel {
public static function get($field = null) {
$user = Configure::read('User');
if (empty($user) || (!empty($field) && !array_key_exists($field, $user))) {
return false;
}
return !empty($field) ? $user[$field] : $user;
}
}
?>

How it works...

By storing the user record in an application-wide configuration variable, we are able to obtain the current user information from anywhere in our application, whether it is controllers, components, models, and so on. This gives us the power to know if there's a logged-in user at any point.

We also need to make sure that views are able to learn whether there is a logged-in user. Even though a view could, technically speaking, still have access to the configure variable, it is normally more elegant to set a view variable to avoid any interaction with PHP classes from the view (except for the view helpers).

Note

When you set variables for the view in AppController, it is very important to make sure no controller action will overwrite the variable. Choose a unique name wisely, and make sure you don't set a view variable with the same name in your controllers.

Finally, we add a handy method to the User model, so we can obtain the current user from our controllers without having to deal with the Configure variable. We can also use the get method to collect a particular bit of user information. For example, to fetch the current user's username from a controller, we would do something like the following:

$userName = User::get('username');

You should not have to load the User model class yourself, as the Auth component does it for you.

CakePHP 1.3 Application Development Cookbook

CakePHP 1.3 Application Development Cookbook

Overview of this book

Related Content you might be interested in

Current Title:

CakePHP 1.3 Application Development Cookbook

Getting the current user's information

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

Note

See also