Handling Related Models in Yii Forms
Normally two Models in an MVC architecture are related to each other, such as Employees and Departments (to use the classic example), where each employee is in one department and each department has multiple employees. Although Yii does a great job of auto-generating most of the code you need, including the form used to create and update a Model, the Yii-generated form won’t properly represent the related Model. In this post I’ll walk you through what you need to do to make your forms work properly for related Models. (continue reading…)
Handling Checkboxes in Yii with non-Boolean Values
On a recent Yii-based project, managing one of the Models required a whole slew of checkboxes to indicate that yes, the quality does apply, or no, it does not. In this case, the value being stored in the database for each attribute was a single letter: Y/N. However Yii, when showing the form to update an item, needs the checkbox value to be a Boolean, in order to properly pre-check the box. Changing the database wasn’t an option in this case, so I had to figure out a good conversion process. In this post, I’ll tell you exactly how I solved this issue. (continue reading…)
Forcing Login for All Pages in Yii
Some time back, I had written a couple of blog posts on authentication and authorization in Yii. As a comment to one of those posts, someone shared some code (also posted in the Yii forums) that requires a login to access any page. The interesting thing about this code is that it’s placed in the primary application configuration file, not within individual Controllers. The benefit to this approach is that a little bit of code can add authorization to your entire site, no matter how many Controllers you have. I’ll explain how to use this approach in this post, although keep in mind that it’s really best for situations where users must be logged in to access almost all of the site’s content. (continue reading…)
