Category: CakePHP

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.

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.

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

Fed up of writing $this->layout = ‘admin’ in all the admin methods of your controllers? Me too.

I realised that instead you could automatically set them in the beforeFilter() of your app_controller instead.

function beforeFilter(){

  if(isset($this->params['prefix'])) {
    //read the admin prefix set in core.php
    $admin = Configure::read('Routing.admin'); 

    if($this->params['prefix'] == $admin){
	
      $this->layout = $admin;
	  
    }
  }    
}

If you need to over-ride this, you can just do so as normal in individual methods.