Studio Canaria

CakePHP Quick Tip: $html->clearCrumbs

Peter Butler - Studio Canaria — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 10:17:07 -0700

Hi All

As part of an ongoing project, I was using the CakePHP's htmlHelper to generate breadcrumbs.

Now combined with the tree behavior's getpath function, the $html->addCrumb() and $html->getCrumbs() functions are great and a real time saver, but...

...for this particular page I actually want to show two or more different bread crumb trails, one for location, and one or more for categories, and that's where I hit a snag, as it stands the htmlhelper allows you to keep adding crumbs and displaying the trail so far, but has no way of clearing the protected _crumbs array, should you need to make more than one trail.

AppHelper to the rescue

Since the app_helper file was added to CakePHP you now have the facility to add additional functionality to built in helpers so by adding the following code to app_helper.php:

    /**
     * enhancement to htmlHelper which allows the crumbs protected array
     * to be cleared so that more than one set of crumbs can be generated in the same view.
     * 
     * @author Peter Butler peter@studiocanaria.com
     * @return void
     * @access public
     */
    function clearCrumbs(){
        $this->_crumbs = array();
    }

You can now use $html->clearCrumbs() to clear down and build a second, third or however many breadcrumb trails you need.

Hope you find this usefull,

till the next time.

CakePHP 1.2.0.7692 RC3

Peter Butler - Studio Canaria — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 01:35:14 -0700

Hi all,

Just a quick post to help spread the word, cakePHP RC3 is finally here, and according to Nate's latest post at the bakery, this will be the final release candidate before they finalise the 1.2 version.

From reading through Nate's article, and the change set, It's clear that the team have worked tirelessly on iteration after iteration of performance improvements, to make the framework faster than ever before. By itself, the bootstrap process is over 10x faster than RC2, and basic requests for static content are now about 5x faster overall.

To celebrate the new release, Jeff and Nate have recorded a new episode of the live show which you can listen to here, and you can download the code from cake forge, or export it from the svn trunk.

Personally, I have just downloaded the new release and can't wait to give it a try, and a big thank you to the entire development team who make my job as a developer more enjoyable, more productive and ultimately more profitable by providing the essential tool the cakePHP has become.

Happy Baking and Thank You cakePHP

Web Development Resources - Aptana Studio

Peter Butler - Studio Canaria — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 12:34:38 -0700

At the risk of showing my age, it's been nearly 28 years since I wrote my first line of code. Way back in the heady days of ZX Basic on my trusty old ZX Spectrum. Back then to get anything usefull done it was Z80 assembly language or nothing.

Over the years I've used a lot of programming languages and a lot of IDE's, from Hisoft Basic on my Atari ST, through to Delphi and Visual Studio.

Nowadays, I tend to work extensively with both the .NET framework using Visual Studio 2008 and PHP using Aptana Studio.

It's available both as a standalone application and as an Eclipse plugin and I have used it both ways, I have also tried many other PHP editors including Komodo, PHPEdit and the PDE plugin for Eclipse but in the end I always tend to come back to Aptana.

For todays mix of PHP, CSS and AJAX/Javascript, I just find it a pleasure to work with and very intuitive.

Of course, I can't write an article on my favourite IDE and miss out Dreamweaver which I have used right back since version 1, but since using Aptana, I find myself almost never using Dreamweaver at all, and best of all, you can download the community edition free of charge or for a very reasonable fee upgrade to the PRO edition.

How about you?

Just for the record, why not use the comments section below to tell me about your IDE of choice.

Quicktips: Finding all the actions in your controller

Peter Butler - Studio Canaria — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:53:12 -0700

Hi All,

Thought I'd share a quick tip today for how to automatically detect all the action names within a given controller.

This follows on from my last quicktip, describing how to detect all the controllers in your application and is usefull from witin navigation code or admin back ends.

$actions = get_class_methods($this);

This returns an array where each element is the name of a method within the current controller.

Filtering your results

You can make this more usefull by filtering the actions, for example to remove all the inherited actions from app_controller use:

$ignore = get_class_methods('Controller');
foreach($actions as $key=>$action){
            if(in_array($action, $ignore)){
                unset($actions[$key]);
                continue;
            }
}

and this can be extended further to remove any private or protected methods with:

$ignore = get_class_methods('Controller');
foreach($actions as $key=>$action){
            if(in_array($action, $ignore)){
                unset($actions[$key]);
                continue;
            }
            if(strpos($action, '_', 0) === 0){
                unset($actions[$key]);
                continue;
            }
}

That's it for today, hope some of you find this helpfull, see you all soon.

CakePHP WhoIs Component

Peter Butler - Studio Canaria — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 01:34:07 -0700

Here's one for all you aspiring web hosting ressellers out there, a fast and flexible whois class all wrapped up as a CakePHP component.

The component makes use of the excellent phpWhoIs class which you will need to download, unzip and place in APP/vendors/phpwhois in order for the component to work.

Click here to download phpWhoIs

phpWhoIs - a brief description

This package contains a Whois (RFC954) library for PHP. It allows a PHP program to create a Whois object, and obtain the output of a whois query with the Lookup function.

The response is an array containing, at least, an element 'rawdata', containing the raw output from the whois request.

In addition, if the domain belongs to a registrar for which a special handler exists, the special handler will parse the output and make additional elements available in the response. The keys of these additional elements are described in the file HANDLERS.

It fully supports IDNA (internationalized) domains names as defined in RFC3490, RFC3491, RFC3492 and RFC3454.

It also supports ip/AS whois queries which are very useful to trace SPAM. You just only need to pass the doted quad ip address or the AS (Autonomus System) handle instead of the domain name. Limited, non-recursive support for Referral Whois (RFC 1714/2167) is also provided.

The WhoIs Component

OK, if you have been following so far, you'll have downloaded phpWhoIs, unzipped it and placed all the files in a folder called phpwhois inside either your APP/vendors folder or your shared vendors folder, now to integrate it into the CakePHP framework using a component.

APP/controllers/components/whois.php

<?php
class WhoisComponent extends Object {
    function lookup($domain,$deep_whois = true) {
        App::import('Vendor','whois',array('file'=>'phpwhois'.DS.'whois.main.php'));
        $whois = new Whois();
        $whois->deep_whois = $deep_whois;
        return $whois->Lookup($domain,false);
    }
}
?>

Short and simple and does the job, basically all we are doing here is creating a wrapper to access the phpwhois class and it's lookup method.

In use

OK, you've got the phpwhois package and the component, now to use them within a controller, simply add Whois to your components array

var $components = array('Whois');

Then from within any of your actions you can simply use:

$result = $this->Whois->lookup('example.com'));

Faster results

The whois lookup is pretty fast already, but if you don't want all the extended information and are simply interested in seeing if a domain is registered or not, then pass false as a second parameter to the lookup method.

Possible uses

Beside the standard whois query or domain registration check, you can also use this to process env('REMOTE_ADDR') to give you information about the current visitors ISP, icluding country code and ISP name, which could be pretty usefull within a stats system or for auto detecting local currency. Let me know if you come up with any other uses or if you use this code in a site then let me know and I will give you a mention.

Anyway, that's your lot for today, till the next time