Probably is pretty obvious for most of the advanced users, but when I started my experience with CakePHP I read a lot of configuring a database, but not multiple ones. There are articles how to use database for development and for production without changing anything but rewriting a function in DATABASE_CONFIG class.

These days we need to choose way of splitting the functionality and we have to decide: Shall we use different databases or shall we put a prefix for every table. So far we choose to use prefix, but I dig into this and I realized that every model could be attached to different database.

Here is the example how to do this:
Read the rest of this entry »

I notice this recently when we start creating the security component of a project. The best way to explain the issue is to give an example:

Imagine that in your application you create an action “edit profile” where each user can change his personal details for the account. If course there will be fields for changing user’s real name, password, email etc., but the username field should be readonly.

The direct approach to create such page is to reuse “edit” action of the user’s controller, but instead of getting the ID from the url, it need to be fetched from the session’s auth variable. The second thing which you have to do is to remove “username” field from the view and you are done. Well, fast and easy, but not very secured…
Read the rest of this entry »

Well, probably you wont believe me, but I wrote whole 3 pages while I realized that it’s so long and probably this is not the right way /and definitely it’s not easy/, so I scratched everything and start over.

It’s been quite long time since I post an article for CakePHP so here it is - shiny brand new post

This post is more a method how to make filtering, rather a rocket science component, because it’s possible to be used even without extra classes /helpers and components/, but I will post a component which will tune the functionality.

So what is all about? Have you ever miss a filtering functionality in your index actions? Well I really miss it

What is the best technique to make filter?
In this example there is a controller Countries which handle the countries in the application. table contain 3 columns, ID, NAME and CODE. Code column is numeric in this example and it’s not following any real naming or country convention.
Read the rest of this entry »

For every project which is going to be started there are at least 11 things which you need to do before. Here is my list of things which need to be happen before starting any project. During my work experience I’ve started many projects and I think that these are the most important issues which you need to do before start the project.
Read the rest of this entry »

New year - new behaviour

Everyone who had experience in Oracle and some frameworks /or at least ADO libs/ experienced the problem of ORA-01704: string literal too long. For the people who hadn’t pleasure to work with oracle - Oracle accept strings in SQL to be not longer than 4000 characters. I always had problems with this issue, because when the sting is too long you need to treat it with oracle variables and binding them in strange way /at least not with ordinary SQL/. The only way found so far is the solution of ADOdb library.
Read the rest of this entry »

Here I would like to show you a behaviour which will help you to handle different date format than yyyy-mm-dd supported from the database. The reason why I created this behaviour is because in most of my projects I had a requirement to display the date format in human readable format.

So, without extra words here is the behaviour class:

Read the rest of this entry »

In some of my projects I had a requirement to prevent deletion of the records, which had children. That’s why I create a small behaviour which checks these cases and prevent this.

Add this code in /app/models/behaviours/has_children.php

Read the rest of this entry »

Today I would like to show you how I am storing and fetching the settings for my applications in CakePHP. The reason why I am doing this is pretty obvious - once the application is complete and installed it’s better to have settings such as

• How many rows per page to show in the paginated table
• Where is the upload dir for the files
• What is the Date format used in the application

And many other.
Read the rest of this entry »

Two months ago I wrote about benefits of Community Frameworks compared with Home-Grown ones. In the article I mentioned some of the benefits of Cake, but it was “scratching the surface” rather than complete info.
Here I want to list all those things, but near to each of them I will give short explanation what is it and how CakePHP implement it.

So, if somebody ask me what are those 10 things which drive me to choose this framework as my primary one I will answer with:
Read the rest of this entry »

In my current project I need to deal with Layout more than adding some header, static menu and footer in it. I need to have dynamic menu loaded from the database plus additional blocks which will contain some data related to the main content. The similar case is YouTube.com, where in every movie you have related movies from the right depending from the tags related to the main movie. I think you get the idea.

Well, searching in the CakePHP Manual, CakePHP Google Group or Bakery doesn’t saticfy mu understanding how to solve the case. Apart from $anything_for_layout: Making HTML from the View available to the layout article I didnt find anything on this topic. And this one sounds like a hack rather than a complex solution.
Read the rest of this entry »