Book Image

CakePHP 1.3 Application Development Cookbook

Book Image

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.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
CakePHP 1.3 Application Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Working with the Set class


One of the most debated decisions CakePHP has ever made was returning arrays as a result of a model find operation. While ORM purists may argue that each returned item should be an instance of a model class, arrays prove themselves very useful, fast, and flexible for manipulating characteristics that can be impossible to achieve with a pure object approach.

The Set class was introduced to give the developer even more power when dealing with array based data structures. With a simple method call, we can manipulate an array with ease, avoiding us the pain of having to build long and complex code blocks.

This recipe shows how to use some of the most useful methods this class provides, while introducing other available methods that may be useful under different scenarios.

Getting ready

To go through this recipe, we need some data to work with. Create the following tables, and populate them with data, by issuing these SQL statements:

CREATE TABLE `students`(
`id` INT...