Flipflops.org » CakePHP

Lithium, Doctrine & doing it yourself

Flipflops — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 22:12:38 +0000

If you use CakePHP you’ll probably be aware (or you’re dead or on holiday or something…) that Gwoo and Nate have left the project and gone elsewhere. Sort of. Well actually they have forked Cake3 into Lithium – souped up CakePHP for PHP 5.3

Unfortunately I’m not going to be using it in the immediate future due to the 5.3 limitation, but I had a good look through the blog example and it looks like it would be a pleasure to work with.

Looking round the Lithium site I also came across Doctrine – an object relational mapper (ORM) system. I spent an evening reading the documentation and decided it was perfect for a project I’m working on at work, unfortunately the next day I discovered we aren’t up to the required PHP version yet (almost, but not quite) so on the back burner for now.

I’m building a small application (about 8 tables) to be integrated into an existing CMS system. The structure of the CMS is essentially front controller based with a great template engine and well developed plugin / module system. The new module I’ve had to develop just didn’t fit well into the existing code structure and so I have ended up writing a Model / Controller system within my module that utilizes the things like the DB library, routing, security, templating etc. of the parent application.

The setup is pretty straight forward – a base model and base controller extended by respective models and controllers for each table. The child controllers and models are mostly pretty thin – mostly just setting class specific instance variables and the calling methods in the base classes with parent:: There isn’t any fancy ORM or anything like that in the models, just good old fashioned SQL, one query or closely related group of queries per method.

It took me about 1 1/2 days to write the framework and about another half day to write the templates (I’ve still got a load of reporting etc. to write) but now I’ve got the views for all the CRUD operations I will need and a lot of reusable code. Thinking about it, I would probably have done about a quarter of the work, in a far less maintainable way if I hadn’t taken this route. Goes to show that as long as your goals are well defined – this kind of approach far from being overkill has saved a huge amount of time and produced very understandable code – and you don’t need an entire framework to do it (with the added advantage that if you write stuff yourself, you hopefully have a better grasp of what is going on).

(I’ve still written a fair amount of Cake code this week )

CakePHP Menu Helper for Tree data

Flipflops — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:11:03 +0000

This is the MenuHelper I use in my CMS system. It is designed to work with data from the Tree behaviour or from any $model->find(‘threaded’) call. I use it to generate multi level CSS menus (that you see at the top of most websites), contextual menus (that you see in sidebars, showing the current page and its ‘branch’) and sitemaps – which let’s face it are basically often just the same as a top level menu but without the fancy stuff to make them pop out when you hover over them.

Prerequisites, history, overview

There are a couple of prerequisites here which may mean that this isn’t applicable for a lot of people. The helper is designed to deal with ‘page’ structures organised in simple /parent/child/grand-child format e.g.

/home
/about
/about/company-history
/about/company-history/gallery
/about/ethos
/about/vacancies
/news
/news/2009/jan
/news/2009/feb
/news/2009/mar
/contact
(etc.)

In my system I have a model ‘Article’ with Tree behaviour attached. So in the example above ‘ethos’ is a child of ‘about’. Some of these pages have real content, but others just act as place holders for other controllers / models – ‘news’ is a placeholder for the ‘News’ model. But all of them (even the placeholders) have other data attached like content for sidebars or meta information.

The helper will add a ‘selected-item’ class to the LI corresponding to the current page, and if it has any parents it will add a ‘selected’ class to each of those parent LIs too.

I create a full slug for each ‘Article’ on $model->save()

The helper operates in 2 modes ‘tree’ (which is default) and ‘context’
‘tree’ will produce a whole list of nested ULs – can be used to generate top level navigation (works well with things like suckerfish)
‘context’ will only produce nested ULs for the current branch

Using the example above if you were on the /about/ethos page and you wanted the navigation fragment in the sidebar you would use ‘context’
/about
/about/company-history
/about/company-history/gallery
/about/ethos
/about/vacancies

Database Fields

These are the default field names, they can be simply overridden to match your database schema.

Required Fields

name
slug_url

Optional Fields

title_for_navigation
redirect_url
redirect_target

Example ‘threaded’ data

[Article] => Array
                (
                    [name] => Find out about us
                    [slug_url] => /about-us
                    [title_for_navigation] => About Us
                    [redirect_url] => 
                    [redirect_target] => 
                    [lft] => 15
                    [id] => 105
                    [rght] => 24
                    [parent_id] => 
                )
 
            [children] => Array
                (
                    [0] => Array
                        (
                            [Article] => Array
                                (
                                    [name] => Philosophy
                                    [slug_url] => /about-us/philosophy
                                    [title_for_navigation] => 
                                    [redirect_url] => 
                                    [redirect_target] => 
                                    [lft] => 16
                                    [id] => 111
                                    [rght] => 21
                                    [parent_id] => 105
                                )
)))

Usage

Include the helper in your controller as usual.

In a view / element to generate complete menu

 
echo $menu->setup($menu_data, array('selected' => $this->here));

In a view / element to generate a context menu from the same data, set the class of the parent UL

 
echo $menu->setup($menu_data, array('selected' => $this->here, 'type' => 'context', 'menuClass' => 'context-menu'));

In a view / element to generate a sitemap from different data, let the helper know to use the ‘Sitemap’ model rather than the default ‘Article’ model and set the parent UL class.

 
$sitemap = new MenuHelper();
echo $sitemap->setup($data,  array('modelName' => 'Sitemap', 'menuClass' => 'sitemap'));

The Helper Code

Download the Helper


/**
 * Menu Helper
 * 
 * @author John Elliott (http://www.flipflops.org)
 * @package app
 * @subpackage app.views.helpers
 * @version 1.0
 * @lastmodified 2009-09-29
 * 
 * This helper is designed to work with the data arrays returned by the Tree behaviour or $model->find('threaded');
 * More specifically it is designed to generate menus composed of nested ULs for use in CMS systems where all the URLs are pretty:
 * 	- naviagtion menus (usually at the top of the page)
 * 	- context menus (usually found at the side) and showing the links in the current branch
 * 	- sitemaps
 * 
 * Overview (A bit of history)
 * 
 * The helper is designed to deal with navigation / page structures organised in simple /parent/child/grand-child like structures
 * for instance:
 * 
 * /home
 * /about
 * /about/company-history
 * /about/company-history/gallery
 * /about/ethos
 * /about/vacancies
 * /news
 * /news/2009/jan
 * /news/2009/feb
 * /news/2009/mar
 * /contact
 * (etc.)
 * 
 * -------------------
 * URLs are generated in the model or controller not in the view / helper
 * -------------------
 * In the system from which this is taken, I create a full slug for each page on $model->save();
 * Some of the pages are actual pages of text and others are palceholders for content in other models
 * but they allow you do things like control the content of left / right columns, set default meta tags etc.
 * The purpose being to create really easy site structures with nice urls, the 
 * In the example above /home, /about etc. are all from a single model 'Article' which is my master model 
 * /news however is a placeholder for the 'News' model and /contact for the 'Contact' model
 * 
 *
 * 
 * Required Fields
 * ------------------
 * title / name (defaults to 'title')
 * page url (defaults to 'slug_url' e.g. /about/ethos)
 * 
 * Optional Fields
 * ------------------
 * title_for_navigation
 * redirect_url
 * redirect_target
 * 
 * Example data
 * ------------------
 * [Article] => Array
                (
                    [name] => Find out about us
                    [slug_url] => /about-us
                    [title_for_navigation] => About Us
                    [redirect_url] => 
                    [redirect_target] => 
                    [lft] => 15
                    [id] => 105
                    [rght] => 24
                    [parent_id] => 
                )
 
            [children] => Array
                (
                    [0] => Array
                        (
                            [Article] => Array
                                (
                                    [name] => Philosophy
                                    [slug_url] => /about-us/philosophy
                                    [title_for_navigation] => 
                                    [redirect_url] => 
                                    [redirect_target] => 
                                    [lft] => 16
                                    [id] => 111
                                    [rght] => 21
                                    [parent_id] => 105
                                )
 * 
 * 
 * 
 *
 * Usage:
 * 
 * Include the helper in your controller as usual.
 * 
 * The helper operates in 2 modes 'tree' (which is default) and 'context'
 * 'tree' will produce a whole list of nested Uls - can be used to generate top level navigation (works well with things like suckerfish)
 * 'context' will only produce nested ULs for the current branch
 * 
 * Using the example above if you were on the /about/ethos page and you wanted the navigation fragment in the sidebar you would use context
 * /about
 * /about/company-history
 * /about/company-history/gallery
 * /about/ethos
 * /about/vacancies
 * 
 * In a view / element to generate complete menu
 * echo $menu->setup($menu_data, array('selected' => $this->here));
 * 
 * In a view / element to generate a context menu from the same data, set the class of the parent UL
 * echo $menu->setup($menu_data, array('selected' => $this->here, 'type' => 'context', 'menuClass' => 'context-menu'));
 * 
 * 
 * In a view / element to generate a sitemap from different data, let the helper know to use the 'Sitemap' model rather than the default 'Article' model and set the parent UL class.
 * $sitemap = new MenuHelper();
 * echo $sitemap->setup($data,  array('modelName' => 'Sitemap', 'menuClass' => 'sitemap'));
 * 
 * Version Details
 * 
 * 1.0
 * + Initial release.
 */
class MenuHelper extends AppHelper {
 
	/**
	 * Current page in application
	 *
	 * @var string
	 */
	private $selected = '';
 
	/** Internal variable for the data
	 *
	 * @var array
	 */
	private $array = array();
 
	/**
	 * Default css class applied to the menu
	 *
	 * @var string
	 */
	private $menuClass = 'menu';
 
	/**
	 * Default DOM id applied to menu
	 *
	 * @var string
	 */
	private $menuId = 'top-menu';
 
	/**
	 * CSS class applied to the selected node and its parent nodes 
	 *
	 * @var string
	 */
	private $selectedClass = 'selected';
 
	/**
	 * CSS class applied to the exact selected node in the tree - in addition to $selectedClass
	 *
	 * @var unknown_type
	 */
	private $selectedClassItem = 'item-selected';
 
	/**
	 * Default Slug
	 *
	 * @var string
	 */
	private $defaultSlug = 'home';
 
	/**
	 * Type of menu to be generated:
	 * 'tree' - to generate a complete tree
	 * 'context' - to only render the specific barnch under the current page
	 *
	 * @var string
	 */
	private $type = 'tree';
 
	/**
	 * Model name used in $array e.g. $data[0]['Article']['name']
	 *
	 * @var string
	 */
	private $modelName = 'Article';
 
	/**
	 * Database column name - (i.e. a shorter version of the name / title for use only in naviagtion)
	 * e.g. A page called 'Welcome to the giant flea circus' 
	 * might be set to show up on navigation as 'home'
	 *
	 * @var string
	 */
	private $titleForNavigation = 'title_for_navigation';
 
	/**
	 * Database column name for title / name
	 * @var string
	 */
	private $title = 'name';
 
	/**
	 * Database column name for complete page slug e.g. /about/history/early-years
	 *
	 * @var string
	 */
	private $slugUrl = 'slug_url';
 
	/**
	 * Database column name for redirect_url for instance if /about/blog redirects to http://blog.somewebsite.com
	 *
	 * @var string
	 */
	private $redirectUrl = 'redirect_url';
 
	/**
	 * Target for redirect (see redirectUrl)
	 *
	 * @var string
	 */
	private $redirectTarget = 'redirect_target';
 
	/**
	 * Minumum number of items required to render a context menu
	 *
	 * @var int
	 */
	private $contextMinLength = 2;
 
	/**
	 * Internal Counter used in type: 'context'
	 *
	 * @var int
	 */
	private $li_count = 0;
 
	/**
	 * Internal flag to see if the page has been matched to an item
	 *
	 * @var bool
	 */
	private $matched = false;
 
	/**
	 * Internal counter
	 *
	 * @var int
	 */
	private $i = 0;
 
	/**
	 * Enter description here...
	 *
	 * @var unknown_type
	 */
	private $rootNode = '';
 
	function __construct(){
 
	}
 
	public function setOption($key, $value){
		$this->{$key} = $value;
	}
 
	public function getOption($key){
		return $this->{$key};
	}
 
	/**
	 * Setup the helper and return a string to echo
	 *
	 * @param array $array Data array containing the lists
	 * @param array $config Configuration variables to override the defaults
	 * @return string
	 */
	public function setup($array, $config = array()){
 
		// update and override the default variables 
		if(!empty($config)){
			foreach ($config as $key => $value) {
				$this->setOption($key, $value);
			}
		}
 
		// set the default slug selected if the current page does not match
		if($this->selected == '/'){
			$this->selected = $this->defaultSlug;
		}
 
		$this->array = $array;
 
 
 
		// get the root node of the selected tree if this a context menu
		if($this->type == 'context'){
			$this->rootNode = $this->getRootNode($this->selected);
		}
 
		$str = $this->buildMenu();
 
		// if the current page has matched one of the links in the tree
		// then get rid of the 'default_slected' placeholder
		if($this->matched == true){
			$str = str_replace('default_selected', '', $str);
		} else {
			$s = ' class="' . $this->selectedClass . '" ';
			$str = str_replace('default_selected', $s, $str);
		}
 
		// if this is a context menu, it looks daft if it only has 1 item 
		// if this is the case hide it
		if($this->type == 'context'){
			if($this->li_count < $this->contextMinLength){
				$str = '';
			}
		}
 
 
		return $this->output($str);	
 
	}
	/**
	 * Call the menu iterator method and if it returns a string warp it up in a UL
	 *
	 * @return string
	 */
	protected function buildMenu(){
 
		$str = $this->menuIterator($this->array);
 
		if($str != ''){
			$str = '. $this->menuId . '" class="' . $this->menuClass . '">' . $str . '
';
		}
 
		return $str;
	}
 
	/**
	 * Explode a url slug and get the root page
	 *
	 * @param string $string 
	 * @return string
	 */
	protected function getRootNode($string){
			$rootNode = '';
			if($string != ''){
				$node = explode('/', $string);
				// $node[0] will always be empty becuase the first char of $this->selected will always be '/'
				$rootNode = $node[1];
			}
			return $rootNode;
	}
 
 
	/**
	 * Recursive method to loop down through the data array building menus and sub menus
	 *
	 * @param array $array
	 * @param int $depth
	 * @return string
	 */
	protected function menuIterator($array){
 
		$str = '';
		$is_selected = false;
		foreach($array as $var){
 
			$continue = true;
			$selected = '';
			$sub = '';
 
			if($this->type == 'context' && ($this->getRootNode($var[$this->modelName][$this->slugUrl]) != $this->rootNode)){
				$continue = false;
			}
 
			if($continue == true){
 
				// if this is the first list item set default_selected placeholder
				$default_selected = '';
				if($this->i == 0){
					$this->i = 1;
					$default_selected = 'default_selected';
				}
 
 
 
				if(!empty($var['children'])){
					$sub .= '';
					$sub .= $this->menuIterator($var['children']);
					$sub .= '
';	
				}
 
				$p = strpos($this->selected, $var[$this->modelName][$this->slugUrl]);
 
 
				if($p === false){
 
				} elseif($p == 0){
						// this is the selected item or a parent node of the selected item
						$selected = ' class="' . $this->selectedClass . '" ';
						$is_selected = true;
						$this->matched = true;
				}
 
				if($this->selected == $var[$this->modelName][$this->slugUrl]){
					// this is the exact selected item
					$selected = ' class="' . $this->selectedClass . ' ' . $this->selectedClassItem . '" ';
				}
 
				// keep track if this is a contextual menu 
				if($this->type == 'context'){
					$this->li_count++;
				}
 
 
				// Get the name / title to be used for the link text
				$name = $this->getName($var);
				// Get the URL / target for the link
				$url = $this->getUrl($var);
 
				$str .= ' . $selected . ' ' . $default_selected . '>';
					$str .= '. $url['url'] . '" ' . $url['target'] . '>' . $name . '';
					$str .= $sub;
				$str .= '
';
 
			}
		}
		return $str;
	}
	/**
	 * Look in the data and check if this is a straight url
	 * or whether it is actually a redirect
	 *
	 * @param array $var
	 * @return array
	 */
	protected function getUrl($var = null){
			$url = array();
 
			if(isset($var[$this->modelName][$this->redirectUrl]) && !empty($var[$this->modelName][$this->redirectUrl])){
				$url['url'] = $var[$this->modelName][$this->redirectUrl];
				if(isset($var[$this->modelName][$this->redirectTarget]) && !empty($var[$this->modelName][$this->redirectTarget])){
					$url['target'] = ' target="' . $var[$this->modelName][$this->redirectTarget] . '" ';
				}
			} else {
				$url['url'] = $var[$this->modelName][$this->slugUrl];
				$url['target'] = '';
			}
			return $url;
	}
 
	/**
	 * See if there is a title_for_navigation 
	 *
	 * @param array $var
	 * @return string
	 */
	protected function getName($var){
		if(isset($var[$this->modelName][$this->titleForNavigation]) && !empty($var[$this->modelName][$this->titleForNavigation])){
			$name = $var[$this->modelName][$this->titleForNavigation];
		} else {
			$name = $var[$this->modelName][$this->title];
		}
		return $name;
	}
 
 
 
}
?>

Sneak Preview

Flipflops — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 12:51:02 +0000

At the moment I’m working on an e-commerce project using the Amazon Product Advertising API. The website is called www.science-fictions.co.uk, and as the name suggests its theme is Science Fiction Books and Fantasy Literature.

The project is built on my brand new CakePHP based CMS system and the Tarzan AWS library which makes connecting to and utilizing Amazon web services, whilst not a breeze, rather enjoyable.

The website is hurtling along at an astonishing rate and with any luck, the first version should be up and live early next week.

Things to come

Flipflops — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 22:27:52 +0000

A bit of a taster really, a post about the things that I intend to write – well that’s one way of getting me to ensure that I do write them.

NestedListHelper
I’ve written a helper to generate nested UL’s from the results of a find(‘threaded’) call. I’ve been using the helper to generate the nested lists for CSS menus and it is also great for sitemaps. Just needs a bit of tidying up before I set it free.

Back to basics with Auth
(This one is actually in draft right now) Another CakePHP one – I’ve been using a quite complex auth / groups / users solution derived the fabulous solution by Studio Canaria but these things get more and more complex. Recently for a project I just needed something simple but I’d forgotten how complex and powerful even basic Auth can be, so I decided to write a kind of back to basics tutorial.

My perfect E-book
I love books. I hate reading PDFs or anything book-like of the screen. My thoughts on the perfect E-book reader.

A quick vaguely Cakey post

Flipflops — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 20:37:44 +0000

Not a real post this really, more of a snippet, but something of interest. I just switched on view cacheing for my UK Business Directory (a personal project of mine) and by my rough and ready benchmarking with firebug the load times increased by 75%. The site is hosted on Dreamhost which whilst great value for money and very featureful isn’t always the fastest of hosts, so it has made a real difference.

I’ve also just added fulltext search to the site – its slightly unusual in that it searches two tables at either end of a HABTM relationship, when I get the time I’m planning to write a quick post about setting that up with CakePHP.

Two CakePHP behaviours to extend MeioUpload

Flipflops — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:53:24 +0000

I’ve been using the the Meio Upload Behaviour for a while as its a very handy piece of code, but as is so often the case it doesn’t do quite what I need. In the past I’ve got round this by hacking together a kind of supporting framework in app_controller and scattered about in my models. But the other day I came across the newest version of the code by Juan Basso on Github and decided to dump my mess of spaghetti code and start from scratch.

Aims

The idea is that each model can have its own uploads with their own defaults, for example:

Products might need to generate images at 3 different sizes with the smallest zoom cropped.
News items might have 2 image sizes but also need to upload a PDF press release.

All of the uploaded files can be viewed and managed centrally from the Upload model.

The changes I wanted to make were as follows:

Use a single Uploads table attached to multiple models (using the Polymorphic behaviour)
The ability to do multiple uploads at once
Rename my uploaded files
Have an UploadVariants model / table with meta information about the thumbnails
Be able to use more of the PHPThumb image options and use them on a per thumbnail basis.

Rather than just take the behaviour and start writing on top of it, I decided to extend the original behaviour (yes you can do this in CakePHP – its just easy to get absorbed in the framework and forget it) and then create an additional behaviour that manages the multiple uploads.

The underlying requirements are quite simple:

(Note 09/07/2009 you don’t actually need the Polymorphic Behaviour, unless you want to do fancy things with your finds)

And my two new behaviours:

At the end of the article is a link to let you download a zipped working CakePHP app with everything in place

The models

First things first. The database tables on which my models are based.

/*
MySQL Backup
Source Host:           localhost
Source Server Version: 5.0.51b-community-nt
Source Database:       je_meio
Date:                  2009/06/29 15:39:15
*/
 
SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0;
#----------------------------
# TABLE STRUCTURE FOR products
#----------------------------
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS products;
CREATE TABLE `products` (
  `id` INT(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `title` VARCHAR(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  `created` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
  `modified` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
  `created_by` INT(11) DEFAULT NULL,
  `modified_by` INT(11) DEFAULT NULL,
  `created_name` VARCHAR(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  `modified_name` VARCHAR(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=1 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;
 
#----------------------------
# TABLE STRUCTURE FOR upload_variants
#----------------------------
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS upload_variants;
CREATE TABLE `upload_variants` (
  `id` INT(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `upload_id` INT(11) DEFAULT NULL,
  `variant` VARCHAR(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  `filename` VARCHAR(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  `quick_type` VARCHAR(50) DEFAULT NULL,
  `width` INT(4) DEFAULT NULL,
  `height` INT(4) DEFAULT NULL,
  `created` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
  `modified` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
  `created_by` INT(11) DEFAULT NULL,
  `modified_by` INT(11) DEFAULT NULL,
  `created_name` VARCHAR(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  `modified_name` VARCHAR(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=1 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;
 
#----------------------------
# TABLE STRUCTURE FOR uploads
#----------------------------
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS uploads;
CREATE TABLE `uploads` (
  `id` INT(8) UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `class` VARCHAR(255) DEFAULT 'Upload',
  `foreign_id` INT(11) DEFAULT NULL,
  `alt` VARCHAR(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  `filename` VARCHAR(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  `dir` VARCHAR(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  `mimetype` VARCHAR(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  `quick_type` VARCHAR(50) DEFAULT NULL,
  `filesize` INT(11) UNSIGNED DEFAULT NULL,
  `position` INT(11) DEFAULT '0',
  `height` INT(11) DEFAULT NULL,
  `width` INT(11) DEFAULT NULL,
  `created` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
  `processed` tinyint(1) DEFAULT '0',
  `modified` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
  `created_by` INT(11) DEFAULT NULL,
  `modified_by` INT(11) DEFAULT NULL,
  `created_name` VARCHAR(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  `modified_name` VARCHAR(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`),
  KEY `class` (`class`,`foreign_id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=1 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

 class Upload extends AppModel {
 
  var $name = 'Upload';
 
  //The Associations below have been created with all possible keys, those that are not needed can be removed
  var $hasMany = array(
    'UploadVariant' => array(
      'className' => 'UploadVariant',
      'foreignKey' => 'upload_id',
      'dependent' => true,
      'conditions' => '',
      'fields' => '',
      'order' => '',
      'limit' => '',
      'offset' => '',
      'exclusive' => '',
      'finderQuery' => '',
      'counterQuery' => ''
    )
  );
 
  var $actsAs = array(
    'Polymorphic',
     'JeMeioUpload' => array(
         'filename' => array(
          'dir' => 'files/uploads',
           'create_directory' => true,
           'max_size' => 2097152,
           'max_dimension' => 'w',
           'thumbnailQuality' => 90,
           'useImageMagick' => false,
           'imageMagickPath' => '/usr/bin/convert',
           'allowed_mime' => array( 'image/gif', 'image/jpeg', 'image/pjpeg', 'image/png'),
           'allowed_ext' => array('.jpg', '.jpeg', '.png', '.gif'),
           'thumbsizes' => array(
             'small'  => array('width' => 90, 'height' => 90),
             'medium' => array('width' => 220, 'height' => 220),
             'large'  => array('width' => 800, 'height' => 600)
           ),
           'default_class' => 'Upload',
           'random_filename' => true
         )
       )
     );
 
}

In the Upload model, just include the Polymorphic behaviour and JeMeioUpload instead of MeioUpload. You could actually use the same defaults as the MeioUpload behaviour itself but there are two additional defaults ‘default_class’ => ‘Upload’, and ‘random_filename’ => true. These both refer to renaming files. As the behaviour can be used to manage uploads from multiple models in a single table it allows you to set the default Upload model. You can also set whether or not you want the files to have the meaningful part replaced with a random string.

class UploadVariant extends AppModel {
 
  var $name = 'UploadVariant';
 
  //The Associations below have been created with all possible keys, those that are not needed can be removed
  var $belongsTo = array(
    'Upload' => array(
      'className' => 'Upload',
      'foreignKey' => 'upload_id',
      'conditions' => '',
      'fields' => '',
      'order' => ''
    )
  );
 
}

The UploadVariant Model is just as it was baked.

class Product extends AppModel {
 
  var $name = 'Product';
 
  var $validate = array(
    'title' => array('notempty')
  );
 
  var $hasMany = array(
        'Upload' => array(
            'className' => 'Upload',    
            'foreignKey' => 'foreign_id',
            'conditions' => array('Upload.class' => 'Product'),
            'dependent' => true,
      'order' => 'Upload.position ASC'
        ),
 
    );
 
    var $actsAs = array(
     'JeMeioUploadPolymorphic'
   );
 
 
 
   var $jeMeioUploadParams = array(
      'filename' => array(
        'dir' => 'files/uploads/',
        'create_directory' => true,
        'allowed_mime' => array('image/jpeg', 'image/pjpeg', 'image/png', 'image/gif'),
        'allowed_ext' => array('.jpg', '.jpeg', '.png', '.gif'),
        'thumbsizes' => array(
          'small'  => array('width'=>60, 'height'=>60, 'image_options' => array('zc' => 1)),
           'large'  => array('width'=>800, 'height'=>400, 'image_options' => array('zc' => 0)),
           'shop'  => array('width'=>265, 'height'=>265, 'image_options' => array('zc' => 0))
        ),
        'random_filename' => false
      )
    );
 
}

Product is a test model set up to demonstrate the multiple uploads and the Polymorphic association to the Upload model. In this case the meaningful part of the filenames will not be replaced with a random string and the ‘small’ thumbnail will be zoom cropped. To find out more about image_options you will need to check the PHPThumb component and the documentation PHPThumb itself (play about and experiment) – what you can and can’t do will also be effected by whether or not you have ImageMagick on your server.

The Controllers

You don’t need to make any changes to your controllers at all.

The Views

There is nothing complicated in the views at all. Just remember to set them up properly for uploads.

The uploads/add.ctp

 echo $form->create('Upload', array('type' => 'file'));?>
	
 		 __('Add Upload');?>
	
 
		echo $form->input('alt');
		echo $form->input('filename', array('type' => 'file'));
 
	?>
	
 echo $form->end('Submit');?>

The products/add.ctp

This view allows up to 3 uploads to be stored in the associated Upload model.

 echo $form->create('Product', array('type' => 'file'));?>
	
 		 __('Add Product');?>
	
		echo $form->input('title');
		echo $form->input('Upload.0.filename', array('type' => 'file'));
		echo $form->input('Upload.1.filename', array('type' => 'file'));
		echo $form->input('Upload.3.filename', array('type' => 'file'));
	?>
	
 echo $form->end('Submit');?>

Summary

The one part I’m not terribly happy with at the moment is error messages returning to the views in the Polymorphic associations (e.g. Product example). At the moment if an image or upload can’t be processed then there is no warning or error message. At the moment this is compromise I’m willing to live with.

I could certainly build some kind of component scaffold or something to go in the controllers to return an error message but I think the gain in responsiveness would probably be outweighed by the added complexity. Right now I can’t figure out an elegant way to get error messages from back to the views – if anybody has any suggestions please let me know.
(Note if you are uploading straight into the Upload model then the error messages are unaffected)

There is also the problem of what do you do when in a situation like the following: If you add a new Product successfully but the associated upload has problems? Ideally you would want to redirect to the edit view for that Product but there seems to be no easy way of doing this from a Model / Behaviour.

One solution that I have implemented in the past is to create dedicated views for uploading – so if you do hack your hacks are easy to manage.

I’ve baked a quick and dirty demo that you can download here. Its so basic that it doesn’t even show the uploaded images!

Todo List

A helper to generate things like uploads fields complete with delete checkboxes and thumbnail images.
Deleting the via the Polymorphic association (don’t think this works right now)

New business directory seeks businesses

Flipflops — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 11:41:41 +0000

I’ve been working on a business directory website in my spare time for a while and it is now live. The directory is www.blinks.org.uk and is for for companies / organisations / individuals based in the UK who want to promote their businesses. It is totally free to register and you won’t find any registration details sold or passed on to anybody!

At the moment it is still very much in a testing stage and I’m after feedback. Comments suggestions etc. would be greatly appreciated.

The site is written with the wonderful CakePHP framework (and god bless view caching)

Tell me more…

The sign up process is quick and easy and only requires that you confirm the email address you register with (this email remains private and is not displayed on the site).

When you have registered you can add as many businesses as you want. You can add the following information for each business you add:

Company name
Website Address
Contact Details
These are mandatory, although you can elect not to show them on the website
Summary
Long Description
Image or Logo
List your business in up to 5 Categories

Click here to register today!

Overload $this->tags & $this->map in Apphelper

Flipflops — Sat, 23 May 2009 10:13:13 +0000

CakePHP is full of amazingly handy little bits and pieces, the trick is discovering them by exploring the API or paying attention to people who know Cake inside out.

AppHelper sits there begging to be filled, the idea being that you can overload core helper methods here; however there is a lot of debate as to whether or not this is actually a good approach and whether it is infact better (safer?) to overload helpers on a case by case basis (e.g. MyFormhelper extends FormHelper). (Personally I think it would be great to have the core helpers moved into base helpers so you can overload the core methods and still refer to them easily (e.g. HtmlHelper extends BaseHtmlhelper extends AppHelper, where HtmlHelper becomes an empty Class)

Two of the things I always have set in AppHelper are as follows:

1. Setup $this->map how I like it. $map defined in the Formhelper (cake/libs/views/helpers/form.php) is part of the auto magic behind forms. When you create a form in a view, Cake queries the model schema and figures out what sort of field it should generate for each database field.

Whilst I can see the reasoning behind the way Cake generates all the fields can easily cascade down and cause odd little lines to appear all over your forms. Often you wouldn’t even notice this, but once you change the background colour of your form… all hell can break loose.

Tags are defined in /cake/libs/view/helpers/html.php so a quick and dirty solution is just to wrap a div with class around the hidden inputs so they can easily be distinguised css wise from all the other tags.

 
class AppHelper extends Helper {
 
  /*
   * overload the default type mappings is /cake/libs/views/helpers/form.php FormHelper
   */
 
  var $map = array(
          'string'  => 'text',    
          'datetime'  => 'text',
          'boolean'  => 'checkbox',  
          'timestamp' => 'text',
          'text'    => 'textarea',  
          'time'    => 'time',
          'date'    => 'text', 
          'float' => 'text'
        );
 
 
   function __construct() {
        parent::__construct();
 
        /*
        * overload the default html tags /cake/libs/view/helpers/html.php
        */
        $this->tags['hidden'] = '
';
 
   }
}

If you are looking for other things to stick in your AppHelper then try Matt Curry’s app_helper url caching.

Don’t add a component twice

Flipflops — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 19:41:10 +0000

Last week I spent an annoyingly long time tracking down a bug caused by what was basically a simple typo.

I discovered that my controller redirects (e.g. $this->redirect(array('action'=>'index')); )were failing, but without generating any errors at all (that I could find).

Eventually I tracked down the cause by just taking the whole controller apart and rebuilding it one step at a time – I was including a component (PhpThumb) in my controller but the component was subsequently being included using App:import within a behaviour.

Setting the ‘admin’ path using $html->link

Flipflops — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 19:39:01 +0000

Usually CakePHP can work out when link needs to be within the /admin/ section of your site. Sometimes however it needs a little help. When this happens you need to add 'admin' => true to the list of parameters.

1 2	echo $html->link($data['SomeModel']['name'], array( 'controller' => 'some_controller', 'action' => 'index', 'admin' => true));