Showing posts with label view. Show all posts
Showing posts with label view. Show all posts

Thursday 28 March 2019

Yii database model

This is partly based on the documentation found at https://www.yiiframework.com/doc/guide/2.0/en/start-databases

ActiveRecord

If you're going to work with records using Yii, it's helpful to make use of the ActiveRecord class. In this example, we're working with a database of country data.  Thankfully, this is a simple scenario which requires the creation of a simple class. Just add this as models/Country.php
<?php
namespace app\models;
use yii\db\ActiveRecord;
class Country extends ActiveRecord
{
}

Controller

Next we need to create a controller which we can use to pass data from the Country ActiveRecord model to a view. In this case, we're also going to add some pagination functionality, which we'll also pass to the view.

  1. First we create a $query object which will be used to retrieve the data.
  2. Next we create a $pagination object which will be used to control the display of that data.
  3. Next we get all the data we want.
  4. Finally we pass the data and pagination objects to the view.

We save this class as controllers/CountryController.php

<?php
namespace app\controllers;
use yii\web\Controller;
use yii\data\Pagination;
use app\models\Country;
class CountryController extends Controller
{
    public function actionIndex()
    {
        $query = Country::find();
        $pagination = new Pagination([
            'defaultPageSize' => 5,
            'totalCount' => $query->count(),
        ]);

        $countries = $query->orderBy('name')
            ->offset($pagination->offset)
            ->limit($pagination->limit)
            ->all();

        return $this->render('index', [
            'countries' => $countries,
            'pagination' => $pagination,
        ]);
    }
}

View

The view performs 3 tasks in this process:
Loops through the data, adding it to the page.
Adding the pagination object to that the data can be paged through.
Adding the LinkPager widget object to the pagination object to automatically create all those links, saving us a bunch of coding.
We'll put the view in the directory views/country/index.php

<?php
use yii\helpers\Html;
use yii\widgets\LinkPager;
?>
<h1>Countries</h1>
<ul>
<?php foreach ($countries as $country): ?>
    <li>
        <?php echo Html::encode("{$country->code} ({$country->name})"); ?>:
        <?php echo $country->population; ?>
    </li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>
<?php echo LinkPager::widget(['pagination' => $pagination]); ?>

Tuesday 26 March 2019

Yii first controller and URLs

This is partly based on the documentation found at https://www.yiiframework.com/doc/guide/2.0/en/start-hello
Within the controllers directory I have a file called SiteController.php. I'll explain a few things about it.

site is the default route for Yii applications and therefore SiteController.php would be (by default) the first controller a user interaction would access. So if I access my application through the URL http://localhost/test/yii-apps/basic/web/ then (by default) the SiteController would be called, and (by deafult) the actionIndex method would be called within that controller.

actionIndex renders the view views/site/index.php within the default layout views/layouts/main.php

In order to create a controller we need to make use of the controller classes declared at the top.

The method actionSay can be called from the URL http://localhost/test/yii-apps/basic/web/index.php
?r=site%2Fsay and within this URL, the r stands for route. route's format is ControllerID/ActionID. This would render the view views/site/say.php within the default layout views/layouts/main.php showing the content 'Hello' since this is the default value of the variable message.

The %2F is the URL encoded version of /

views/site/say.php looks like this:

<?php
use yii\helpers\Html;
echo Html::encode($message);
?>

To extend this approach the URL http://localhost/test/yii-apps/basic/web/index.php?r=site%2Fsay&message=Hello+Mick would pass a string Hello+Mick to the value of the variable message and the resulting page would display the string 'Hello Mick'.

Thus SiteController.php looks like this.

<?php
namespace app\controllers;
use yii\web\Controller;
class SiteController extends Controller
{
    public function actionIndex()
    {
        return $this->render('index');
    }

    public function actionSay($message = 'Hello')
    {
        return $this->render('say', ['message' => $message]);
    }
}
?>

Thursday 21 March 2019

Yii views and layouts

Within Yii we have the concept of views and layouts. This can get a little confusing for 2 reasons:

  1. They both reside within the views directory
  2. The higher level is the layout, which lies within a sub directory if views i.e views/layouts

That aside once you strip the garbage found in most tutorial the concept is straight forward.
Let's take a layout as our starting position. In this case views/layouts/main.php
This contains 3 elements which are particular to Yii.

  1. The declaration of a variable from config/web.php to set the language
  2. The declaration of a variable which resides in the view for the title tag
  3. The all important echo of the $content variable which displays the contents of the view

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="<?php echo Yii::$app->language ?>">
<head>
    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
    <title><?php echo $this->title ?></title>
</head>
<body>
<?php echo $content; ?>
</body>
</html>

Now let's look at the views/site/index.php
This view passes the title variable which is used in the <title> tag. of the layout above. "Hello world!" is displayed where $content is echo'd from the layout above.
<?php
$this->title = 'My Yii Application';
?>
Hello world!