CakePHP offers a good selection of tools to help you retrieve the data. Recently, I came into a situation where I needed to find and paginate results based on a single, distinct column in the table. Distinct data can be tricky, especially if the tools do not allow you to…
CakePHP is one of those frameworks where it is easy to set up and get an application running in a minimal amount of time. It provides different securities, helps, and functions in the framework so that your application can run smoothly and be safe. As with all applications, the level of security and functionality depends on the developer, not the code, not the language, not the database. An application is only as secure, functional and reliable as the person/team who is coding it. One of the reasons I do like Cake is that the built in security and helpers offer a developer a great way to secure data, validate it, and display it. And that can also be one of the more trickier parts of getting the application to work correctly, finding the data to do something with it.
CakePHP provides some functionality for finding the data, this is done using the “find” method. You can read more about this at the Cookbook. Using this, one can grab data from many different tables if needed, or just one table. For this exercise, I am going to use dummy data to show how to find data, using simplistic finds, and using joins, and sub-queries. So first lets examine the data tables. Not all of these are going to be connected. This is a very simplistic, quickly drawn up solution to a lending library
For today, lets dive back into some code, well data modeling at least. When you set up an application that connects to a database, you need to understand the data that will be working in the application. This is the data that will be edited, added, read and even scrutinized…
So as I am sitting here trying to get caught up on the StephenHird site, I am thinking a little more about it. It seems like it is just a huge issue right now and am not able to complete what I really want to complete on the site. So…
So it has been a couple of weeks since I have posted. But now we need to set up some base code before we can go forward with the details and then adding in the Facebook Graph API. In the last post, the Data model was set up. We have skills and certifications as standalone tables. Skills with the levels and areas tables connected together. We also have the main glue of resumes, connected to covers and tasks which itself is connected to jobs. A lot of tables to create the resume section, but will keep some of this information all together. We need to create some code so that we can get all this information.
If you Baked each object, and used the Bake methods to create the model, and associations, as well as the controllers an views, you will have some code ready to use and ready to go. After you have Baked these items, the sample code that is created is ok to begin with. However, we want to take advantage of a very important technique, and the is the centralization of code, and prevent code duplication. There is one other thing that gets to me, and this is more of an OCD thing for me in code, and that is the way that Cake does the edit check in the controller. In the base created code, it creates a section of code that checks for an ID. If it is not passed, then it redirects the page elsewhere. Like so:
function edit($id = null) {
if (!$id && empty($this->data)) {
$this->Session->setFlash(__('Invalid resume', true));
$this->redirect(array('action' => 'index'));
}
. . . .
}
So in this code segment, if one gets to the edit form, and an ID is passed, and the form is not filled in, then it will display the actual form. And if the ID is not passed in, then it redirects to the Index page. For examples, if the site name was test.com:
www.test.com/resume/edit/2 – will result in the form being shown
www.test.com/resume/edit – will result in a redirect and the error message
Now here is where my OCD kicks in a little. . . .
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Now that I have jumped almost 2 weeks without a post, as I have been super busy, this should have been a real easy item to post, but I wanted to make sure that this is done correctly. This is probably one of the easiest methods to add some great Facebook functionality in your site. This revolves around comments to a page. In my example, I am posting topics to discuss. This is mainly just a small little blurb that I will enter via an admin form on the site, and then list the different topics for everyone to select one. Once they select it, they can view the details of the topic and then comment on it using the Facebook API/Social plugin. So as always, lets go through a basic plan for this idea.
1. The model is Topic, with a table in the DB labeled “topics”
2. Only the admin has access to add or edit the topics
3. All comments on this topic will be done through the Facebook API/Social Plugin Comments
4. Topics will have a title that will also double as the Unique ID (to be explained later)
5. Topic titles, or themes, will not be allowed to be edited, to be explained why later
6. Administration of the comments will be done by the Facebook Application admins, which differs from the site admins
7. Start Dates will determine if the topic is allowed to be visible yet
8. End dates are optional, and will be built upon later with more advanced FBML/FB JS libraries
And there it is, some basic ideas behind the whole idea. So now lets get into some of the items called out in Numbers 4 and 5
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OK, I finally got my data models set up and working. I have the initial CakePHP set up on the site, it is using v1.3, and now I am ready to set it up for the Facebook integration, and start to add the integration. When we first set up the application on the Facebook side, I chose to do an “iframe” version of the application, as I want Facebook on my site, and be able to have integration with some of the great Facebook tools on the site, and be able to “promote me”. And remember this is just a way to show a possible real world example of how to integrate these things with your site. Actual applications may vary, but this is the base to integrate. At least, as of this posting it is the base, it may change in the future.
So lets go ahead and dive into it. If you do not have the application ID for your Facebook application, you can get it at the following:
http://www.facebook.com/developers/apps.php
The next thing is to grab the API and code from Facebook. This can be found at the following page:
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/
This is the main page, and you will need to scroll to the bottom of the page. This will list different APIs that are available. I am going to be using the PHP and JavaScript SDKs. This will provide the back end that I will want, and will also provide a positive user experience on the front end. So be sure to download both SDKs.
After that, now we need to start getting some stuff set up. In this post, I am just going to explain how to get this set up, and working right now. It is important that we get the correct items working, and so we will be working with the “pages” area for the JS SDK, and creating a very simple controller for the PHP SDK so we can get set up and running. I am just using, for right now, the base CakePHP CSS styles and layouts. All we need is a page to display some of the basic items to ensure that we have installed the SDKs in the proper locations. So lets go.
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The next few posts will examine how I will integrate a Facebook application into one of my sites: stephenhird.com. If you have browsed to this site, you will see there is already a Facebook platform there. And while it does show some of the great things to do with the API, it is very basic and really does nothing. So In this post I will examine what I want to do with it, how to set up an initial application on Facebook, and then go from there. This will likely happen over the next few weeks/months and will be a little more drawn out depending on how much time I have to document this process. This is step one, and step one will always include planning.
First I need to figure out what I want to have on my site. Since it is my name that is on the URL, I will need to create a way that this site will be an online portfolio, biography and information repository. When doing this for any site, it is important to remember your brand. Even for individual sites like this, it is important for branding, because this is who I am, I do not want it to be a classic case of slop on the web. This site before was mainly just a testing ground and now will need to be more.
A side note here, my name is the same spelling as a famous photographer based in London. His site is well put together with good descriptive links and a great example of combining minimalist ideas with styled presentation. He keeps his brand on the pages and the site does not confuse or mislead with extra peripheral items, or overuse of Flash or other heavy web technologies loading down the page. His site is located at: http://www.stephenhird.co.uk/
OK, now on to the planning and setting up the Facebook Application.
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This post is about my experience with loading in PEAR to a CakePHP 1.2.x application. This may be the right way or the wrong way, but I got it to work throughout the application. I had to do some changes, and if there is a better way of doing this, please let me know.
First off, here is the issue. I needed to be able to export a group of records from the database to an excel spreadsheet. I have tried to use the Excel Spreadsheet add in that is listed on the Bakery. It works nice, and I had to do some modification for 1.2, but it worked. But not the way I wanted it. I have used the PEAR library Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer before and I like the type of control that I wanted, over the cells, the formatting, the merging, etc etc etc. It provides the type of control that I wanted. So here is what I did to get this to work with the CakePHP framework.
First, I have to download the PEAR library and the Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer libraries to use. Since I use a local system to help develop, I could download these libraries to the local system and transport these over to the CakePHP application. So I went to PEAR site to get the libraries. To download these I ran the following commands:
pear install PEAR-1.8.1 pear install OLE-1.0.0RC1 pear install Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer-0.9.1
URL’s are listed below:
http://pear.php.net/package/PEAR/download
http://pear.php.net/package/Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer/download
http://pear.php.net/package/OLE/download
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Here is a topic that has really flustered a lot of developers. Regular expressions is a concept that can be hard to get a real handle on. PHP has a couple of functions that can help do regular expressions. The one I focus on most is using the function:
preg_match()
This is a very useful tool, and if you look at the PHP manual for ereg(), it states that the function “preg_match” is a faster alternative to “ereg()”. Now while I am not going to get into the details of the speed and response times for both functions, as there will always be someone with a different opinion or case that shows how their way is better, and that is fine. What most people have a hard time dealing with is getting the actual match to do what is needed. There are times when It is just easier to do a Google search and get some code that someone else has already done and plug it in. But the real power is knowing what you are doing first, that way you can build your own.
For this example, we can take a look at CakePHP’s own little validation object. When you set up a model and add some validation to it, it calls this object. Based on the data that this going into the tables, it will call one of these functions. The way these functions work is by checking the input for a specific character list/set that should be contained in the text. If the entry does not match up, then it is not validated. The way CakePHp does this is by using the preg_match() function.
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