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…)
Caching the Database Schema using MemCached with Yii
I’ve just wrapped another project using the Yii framework (my fourth in the past year) and so I’ve got a few more topics to write about. I really like the Yii framework (obviously) and think it’s very accessible, but there are still things that take me some time to figure out, so those topics make for good blog posts! In this one, I’ll walk through what I had to do to cache the database schema using memcached. For that matter, I’ll explain why you’d want to do this in the first place… (continue reading…)
