Category: CakePHP

I wrote this as a response to a post on this blog – it has a lot of useful links and it also got me thinking.

I’ve been a full time PHP developer for 3 years now (ASP prior to that) – over the past few months I’ve been learning and writing a couple of sites in Cake.

MVC is quite a different way of working to the way most PHP things seem to have been built (and the way I have built my projects) – but when you persevere and everything falls into place you don’t want to go back.

I find myself constantly checking to see if the work I’ve done so far in Cake is up to the point where I can stop using our current CMS framework at work and move to a Cake based system – unfortunately it isn’t quite there – but it will be soo, and I can’t wait.

Personally the hardest thing I have found is the transition to getting query results as quite complex arrays rather than the simple flat results that you get from mysql_fetch_array.

The one thing that I have found invaluble (when dealing with multi table relationships) as an aid is to simply pr() the variable holding my results array into the view I’m working on so I can see the paths I need to follow to the data I want.

I’ve been getting some very odd results with Joshua McFarrens excellent checkbox helper and ended up having to modify it slightly to get it to work. Here is my revised version:

'Text' pairs) 
     * @param array $selected Selected checkboxes 
     * @param string $inbetween String that separates the checkboxes. 
     * @param array $htmlAttributes Array of HTML options 
     * @param  boolean $return         Whether this method should return a value 
     * @return string List of checkboxes 
     */ 
    function checkboxMultiple($fieldName, $options, $selected = null, $inbetween = null, $htmlAttributes = null, $return = false) 
		{ 
			
       		$this->setFormTag($fieldName); 
       		 if ($this->tagIsInvalid($this->model, $this->field)) 
			 	{ 
            		if (isset($htmlAttributes['class']) && trim($htmlAttributes['class']) != "") 
						{ 
                			$htmlAttributes['class'] .= ' form_error'; 
           				}
					else 
						{ 
                			$htmlAttributes['class'] = 'form_error'; 
						} 
        		} 
				
        if (!is_array($options)) 
			{ 
            	return null; 
        	}  
			   
        if (!isset($selected)) 
			{ 
				$selected = $this->tagValue($fieldName); 
        	} 
				
		while(list($key, $name) = each($options))
			{
				$optionsHere = $htmlAttributes; 
				
				if(in_array($key, $selected))
					{
						$optionsHere['checked'] = 'checked'; 
					}
					
				$optionsHere['value'] = $key; 
            	$checkbox[] = "
" . sprintf($this->tags['checkboxmultiple'], $this->model, $this->field, $this->parseHtmlOptions($optionsHere), $name) . "
\n"; 
			}
		
		
        return "\n" . sprintf($this->tags['hiddenmultiple'], $this->model, $this->field, null, $name) . "\n
\n" . $this->output(implode($checkbox), $return) . "
\n"; 
    } 
     
	} 
?>

(The difference between this and the original version is that the foreach loop has been replaced with a while(list loop that works in slightly different way.)