Category: CakePHP

I just had one of those odd moments that happen when you are stuck and are trawling through Google and you come across something you have written. At the moment I have a blessed respite from the usual rubbish at work of sorting out and extending other peoples bad code, and I am writing a pretty big website CMS using CakePHP. (I haven’t touched it for about a month and I had quite forgotten how pleasant it can be to work with.)

I’ve got a bit of a routing issue – well kind of – I have a situation like this:

I have a controller called Products based on a table called products that also uses a table called product_items (products is actually a table of product categories – but this is all in the name of nice urls, product_items contains the actual products)

For example:

• http://www.somewebsite.com/products – shows you a list of product categories e.g. ‘Pet Foods’
• http://www.somewebsite.com/products/pet_foods – shows you all the products within the ‘Pet Foods’ category
• http://www.somewebsite.com/products/pet_foods/chappie – shows you the detail page for chappie

This all works fine – the way I have done it is to do the following, I have set up the following route:

$Route->connect('/products/(.*)', array('controller' => 'products', 'action' => 'index'));

So anything gets pointed at the index method in the controller, my code within the index method looks something like this:

function index($product_cat_url = null, $product_item_url = null) {

		
		
	if($product_cat_url)
			{
                           // check the product cat is valid
                        }

        if($product_item_url)
			{
                           // check the product item is valid
                        }

        etc.

This lets me pass all the actions through a single method – works great – but now I want to add locations so for instance I might have a url like:

• http://www.somewebsite.com/products/london/pet_foods – shows you all the products within the ‘Pet Foods’ category in london

Obviously I can just add more code in the index method, but then this in itself might get really unwieldy – but it has got me thinking is there a better way of doing this? I was Googling and found the following thread where I used a beforeFilter() to pass it to a different controller – but then I might just end up duplicating loads of code in two methods…

On Friday afternoon I spent the last hour of my day pulling my hair out. I’ve been building a CRM system for a recruitment agency. We had just had a meeting and they asked me to change one of the relationships from Client hasAndBelongsToMany Location and Client hasMany Job to Client hasMany Job and Job hasAndBelongsToMany Location.

This should have been a quick simple change, but nothing was working. Nothing was erroring either though. This morning I came in and examined the $data POST arrays.

This is what I discovered:

This array saves the data:

Array
(
    [Candidate] => Array
        (
            [skill_1] => Swiming Instructor
            [skill_2] => French
            [skill_3] => 
            [skill_4] => 
            [skill_5] => 
            [title_1] => Mrs
            [forename_1] => Celine
            [surname_1] => Rogers
            [address] => 
            [postcode] => 
            [phone] => 
            [mobile] => 
            [notes] => 
            [email] => 
            [active] => 1
            [id] => 13
        )

    [Location] => Array
        (
            [Location] => Array
                (
                    [0] => 
                    [1] => 8
                    [2] => 11
                )

        )

)

This array doesn’t save the data:

Array
(
    [Location] => Array
        (
            [Location] => Array
                (
                    [0] => 
                    [1] => 10
                    [2] => 2
                )

        )

    [Job] => Array
        (
            [client_id] => 2
            [name] => Web Designer
            [summary] => Web Designer in Taunton
            [active] => 1
            [id] => 3
        )

    

)

The difference is in the working example the ‘key’ model in the relationship is listed first and the related model data (Location) is posted afterward.

I had a quick look at the views and ended up moving a hidden field (data[Job][client_id]) with the so that part of the ‘key’ model was posted first. Sure eneough the layout of the $data POST array had changed – and guess what the data saved correctly.

Array
(
    [Job] => Array
        (
            [client_id] => 2
            [name] => Web Designer
            [summary] => Web Designer in Taunton
            [active] => 1
            [id] => 3
        )

    [Location] => Array
        (
            [Location] => Array
                (
                    [0] => 
                    [1] => 10
                    [2] => 2
                )

        )

)

Now that I’ve got it working I can see that there is a certain sense to this – I can understand why it happens, but I certainly can’t remember reading anything about this.

The moral of the story? Maybe we need to think about the logical layout of forms more instead of shunting bits about until they look good (which is what I do in a rush). This isn’t necessarily a bad thing though, one of the benefits of using frameworks is that by following a set of rules we benefit from greater consistency of method in our code and therefore produce things that are more robust and bug free.