I'm new to CI.
In my future project, we will have a menu structure like this:
Menu1
--Submenu1
--Submenu2
--[...]
Menu2
--Submenu3
--Submenu4
[...]
So, many menus, and each of them will have many submenus (many submenus will have a CRUD, or similar).
My problem is making the routes to all this pages, I would like to organize the Controllers inside folders (with the menu's name) and each submenu would be a Controller, like this:
/app/Controller/Menu1/Submenu1.php
/app/Controller/Menu1/Submenu2.php
/app/Controller/Menu2/Submenu1.php
etc...
And then my Views would be like this:
/app/Views/Menu1/Submenu1/index.php
/app/Views/Menu1/Submenu1/insert.php
etc...
But at the same time, I don't want to create one entry in the Routes.php file for each submenu, is there a way to create a route that simply takes the path URI and search in the folders for that exact values?
Firstly, bear in mind that you need to make code that is manageable. From the looks of it, your views and controllers will need to be a bit more streamlined otherwise it will become quite a lot to manage.
Therefore I think you would be better off doing a number of things:
1) Create a controller called MY_Controller.php in application/core and extend all controllers from it (that way you can centralise your methods)
2) User a per menu controller. So Controller = Menu1 or Menu2
3) Try and keep your views as re-usable as possible to avoid over complicating things
You should end up with something like this:
menu1/Submenu1 >> Controller (Menu1) >> function Submenu1
menu1/Submenu2 >> Controller (Menu1) >> function Submenu2
Bear in mind that with Codeigniter the following url will result in:
url: menu1/submenu1/param1/param2
Controller
function submenu1($param1,$param2)
So there is no need to get URI components as CI will route them automatically.
Related
i am implementing a backoffice system with many Models and Relations.
Now im stuck with my UI Stragegy:
Lets assume i have Houses and Rooms. One House has many Rooms.
I have created controllers for both Models the "Laravel" way.(Resource Controllers)
So i have routes for both of them
example.com/backoffice/house
example.com/backoffice/room
What i want to implement sounds simple:
I want an Button inside the Detail View of a House ("Create Room for this House") which redirects me to "room/create" but in the create view i want to set the value for "house_id" to the id of the House i am comming from. So i can normaly use the store method in the RoomController and then redirect back to the house.
I want a general way because i must use this function on many Models/Views. I am thinking about a session variable but i think eventually has someone a better way for generally handling such cases? Or a better idea for UI Handling?
Apparently, Laravel removed some of their awesome documentation for version 5.6, being nested resource controllers.
What you could do, is use nested routes.
Let's assume your current controllers are set up the following way:
Route::resource('houses', 'HouseController');
Route::resource('rooms', 'RoomController');
If you change this part to the following:
Route::resource('houses', 'HouseController');
Route::resource('houses.rooms', 'RoomController');
This couples every room to a house and is really easy to manage. It gives you URL's like houses/4/rooms/create, which gives you a house_id in your create method instantly:
public function create($houseId)
{
return view('houses.rooms.create', ['houseId' => $houseId]);
}
If you want to edit a room, it is exactly the same:
public function edit($houseId, $roomId)
The Laravel 5.1 documentation still has an example of this technique.
To do this, i would suggest the following way (there might be other ways also)
Change Route:
Route::get('room/create/{house_id?},'Controller#action')->name('room.create')
Add <a> tag in house_view.blade.php file.
Create Room for this House
Room Controller file.
public function formCreate($house_id)
{
return view('form.room_create', ['house_id' => $house_id]);
}
Add type hidden <input> tag in room_create.blade.php file
<input type="hidden" id="house_id" name="house_id" value="{{$house_id or ''}}">
I know this doesn't exactly match the form of www.example.com/class/function/ID/, but what I want to display to the user would make more sense.
This is what I would like to do:
www.example.com/project/id/item/item_id/
So, an example would be:
www.example.com/project/5/item/198237/
And this would be the behavior:
www.example.com/project/ --> This would show a list of projects (current implementation)
www.example.com/project/5/ --> This would show a list of items on project 5 (current implementation)
www.example.com/project/5/item/ --> This wouldn't really mean anything different than the line above. (Is that bad?)
www.example.com/project/5/item/198237/ --> This would show details for item 198237.
So, each item is directly associated with one and only one project.
The only way I can think how to do this is to bloat the "project" controller and parse the various parameters and control ALL views from that "project" controller. I'd prefer not to do this, because the model and view for an "item" are truly separate from the model and view of a "project."
The only other solution (that I am currently implementing and don't prefer) is to have the following:
www.example.com/project/5/
www.example.com/item/198237/
Is there any way to build a hierarchical URL as I showed at the beginning without bloating the "project" controller?
There are 3 options, sorted by how practical they can be:
Use URI Routing. Define a regular expression that will use a specific controller/method combination for each URL.
Something like that could help you, in routes.php:
$route['project/'] = 'project/viewall';
$route['project/(.+)'] = 'project/view/$1';
$route['project/(.+)/item/'] = 'project/view/$1';
$route['project/(.+)/item/(.+)'] = 'item/view/$2';
That is, considering your controllers are item and project respectively. Also note that $n in the value corresponds to the part matched in the n-th parenthesis.
Use the same controller with (or without) redirection. I guess you already considered this.
Use redirection at a lower level, such as ModRewrite on Apache servers. You could come up with a rule similar to the one in routes.php. If you are already using such a method, it wouldn't be a bad idea to use that, but only if you are already using such a thing, and preferably, in the case of Apache, in the server configuration rather than an .htaccess file.
You can control all of these options using routes.php (found in the config folder). You can alternatively catch any of your URI segments using the URI class, as in $this->uri->segment(2). That is if you have the URL helper loaded. That you can load by default in the autoload.php file (also in the config folder).
Ok first off I have to say I'm very new to Rails. I have spent the last few days going through tutorial after tutorial and still missing a few concepts. Mainly because I just want to start off with a simple site structure but every tutorial is either a shopping cart or a blog which are more applications within a site. I have some pages on my site that will have photo galleries that are database driven but for now I'm just trying to get some answers to these questions.
Site structure:
home | photos | about | work | contact
Work has sub pages for example:
html | ruby | rails | bla-bla
Controllers:
Do I need to set up a controller for every new page or could I have one controller that handles all main level pages.
If I could use one controller how would that work and would I need to define an action to handle each page ( view ) like
class MainController < ApplicationController
def index
end
def photos
end
def contact
end
# and so on ......
end
Routing:
How would I route the above.
Whats the difference between a resource and a *get
get "photos/photos"
resources :photos
When I setup a controller for a specific page like.
rails g controller Contact contact
It creates a folder inside my views called contact and inside it is a view called contact meaning my url is contact/contact
it also adds a route get "contact/contact"
Now what if I only want the user to type http://mydomain/contact then this is not going to work. How would I set it up so the user doesn't have to add http://mydomain/contact/contact
The only way I could find a way around this was to use the match verb.
match "contact" => 'contact#contact'
Does this mean I have to use the match for every page on my site to change the url path?
These are just a few of many question I have that are not so clear in most of the tutorials I have gone over. Please don't tell me to use the user guide as I have already and am felling overwhelmed right now. I just would love some clear answers from some developers who are working in rails and would go about setting up a structure like I have outlined above.
Thanks
You're going to get some conflicting advice I think, but here's what I'd do.
Create a MainController (I prefer HomeController as it will also handle the homepage, but that's just me). This controller will handle the actions for home, about, and contact.
Create a PhotosController since you said photos come from the database and there's a good chance there is an index/listing page and individual pages for each photo.
Create a WorksController that handles the work main page and all the sub pages.
Now.. some people would argue (myself included) that home, about, contact, and all the work pages (sub pages too) should be handled by a generic PagesController that is smart enough to know what to do. I'm not gonna get into that now though.
The difference between these two routes:
get "photos/photos"
resources :photos
Is that the first will only create a single route for a GET request to '/photos/photos'. The second will create the standard CRUD operations for '/photos'.
For your static pages, I probably would go ahead and just create:
match "about" => 'main#about'
match "contact" => 'main#contact'
...
It's harder to say for the photos and work since I don't know what all you'll be doing there. The above isn't as DRY as it could be, but unless you go the "smart pages controller" route it's the simplest.
I was just wondering what the best practice approach is for deciding where to create an action/view in certain situations.
If User hasMany Video
where is the best place to create the action/view to show user videos?
So within the Users account page 'My Videos' link do you
just create a users/my_videos action and view.
create videos/my_videos action and view.
or as is most likely you would already have a Controller/Action of videos/index which would have search functionality. Simply use this passing in a user id.
Any thoughts/advice greatly appreciated
Thanks
Leo
One potential option is to do the following:
Since the videos likely have much more code around them than a simple which user has which videos lookup the video list action should be in the VideosController.
In past projects I have (in CakePHP 1.3) used prefix routing to address some of this.
In config/core.php make sure you enable routing.prefixes to include a 'user' prefix.
<?php
... in routes.php ...
Routing.prefixes = array( 'user' );
?>
In the videos controller make an action with the following signature:
<?php
...
public function user_index( $userID = null ){
...
}
?>
and in the views where you link to the list of users videos the html::link call should look similar to the following:
<?php
...
echo $this->Html->link( 'User\'s Videos', array(
'controller' => 'videos',
'action' => 'index',
'prefix' => 'user',
$this->Session->read( 'Auth.User.id' )
));
?>
Of course this assumes you are using the Auth component here to track the logged in user. The Session helper code to read the authenticated user id might need tweaking.
This lets you a) Not worry too much about routing aside from enabling prefix routing and b) will quickly let you have pretty links like so -- site.com/user/videos/index/419
Couple this with some Slug love ( this is the best link for this I have seen - no slug field required on the db layer - http://42pixels.com/blog/slugs-ugly-bugs-pretty-urls )
You could even end up with urls like so quite easily: site.com/user/videos/index/eben-roux
and with just a tiny bit of editing to app/config/routes.php you could eliminate the /index/ portion and the results would be SEO friendly and user friendly in the format:
site.com/user/videos/eben-roux
http://book.cakephp.org/view/945/Routes-Configuration
As always with code you have the two extremes of:
1) Putting everything in a single controller
2) Having every action in a separate controller
The ideal approach will nearly always be somewhere between the two so how to decide what is grouped together and what is separated?
In MVC I tend to look at the Views and see what the commonalities are: as you point out Users have a ref to a collection of Videos in the Model, but would you want both sets of Data in any single View? i.e. In this example is it likely that you would be on a page that both managed user details, and displayed the list of vids? If not then I'd suggest separate controllers.
If either controller would then be extremely simple - e.g. one method, then may be worth considering merging the two.
I like to keeps things separate.
What I'd do is an index action in videos controller, passing user's id as argument and then displaying only current users video.
public function index($id = null){
$this->paginate = array( 'conditions'=> array('Video.user_id' => $id));
$this->set('videos', $this->paginate());
}
My take is that it depends on the responsibility you assign to the controllers.
I would say that something like a User or a Video controller should be concerned with only those entities.
You may want to consider something like a UserDashboard (or something similar but appropriately named) as alluded to by Dunhamzzz in the comments. This can aggegate all the functionality from an "entry" point-of-view. The same way a banner / shortcut / action menu would work.
Your UserDashboard would use whatever data layer / repository is required to get the relevant data (such as the IVideoRepository or IVideoQuery implementation).
Usually when something doesn't feel right it isn't. Try splitting it out and see how it works. You can alsways re-arrange / refactor again later.
Just a thought.
I don't think there's a 'one-rule-fits-all' solution to this question, but I would try to take an approach in which you would determine what the main object is that you're dealing with, and adding the action/view to that object's controller.
In your example I'd say that your main object is a video and that the action you're requiring is a list of video's filtered by a specific property (in this case the user's id, but this could very well be a category, a location, etc.).
One thing I would not do is let your desired URL determine in which controller you put your functionality. URLs are trivially changed with routes.
So, I'm not quite sure how I should structure this in CakePHP to work correctly in the proper MVC form.
Let's, for argument sake, say I have the following data structure which are related in various ways:
Team
Task
Equipment
This is generally how sites are and is quite easy to structure and make in Cake. For example, I would have the a model, controller and view for each item set.
My problem (and I'm sure countless others have had it and already solved it) is that I have a level above the item sets. So, for example:
Department
Team
Task
Equipment
Department
Team
Task
Equipment
Department
Team
Task
Equipment
In my site, I need the ability for someone to view the site at an individual group level as well as move to view it all together (ie, ignore the groups).
So, I have models, views and controls for Depart, Team, Task and Equipment.
How do I structure my site so that from the Department view, someone can select a Department then move around the site to the different views for Team/Task/Equipment showing only those that belong to that particular Department.
In this same format, is there a way to also move around ignoring the department associations?
Hopefully the following example URLs clarifies anything that was unclear:
// View items while disregarding which group-set record they belong to
http://www.example.com/Team/action/id
http://www.example.com/Task/action/id
http://www.example.com/Equipment/action/id
http://www.example.com/Departments
// View items as if only those associated with the selected group-set record exist
http://www.example.com/Department/HR/Team/action/id
http://www.example.com/Department/HR/Task/action/id
http://www.example.com/Department/HR/Equipment/action/id
Can I get the controllers to function in this manner? Is there someone to read so I can figure this out?
Thanks to those that read all this :)
I think I know what you're trying to do. Correct me if I'm wrong:
I built a project manager for myself in which I wanted the URLs to be more logical, so instead of using something like
http://domain.com/project/milestones/add/MyProjectName I could use
http://domain.com/project/MyProjectName/milestones/add
I added a custom route to the end (!important) of my routes so that it catches anything that's not already a route and treats it as a "variable route".
Router::connect('/project/:project/:controller/:action/*', array(), array('project' => '[a-zA-Z0-9\-]+'));
Whatever route you put means that you can't already (or ever) have a controller by that name, for that reason I consider it a good practice to use a singular word instead of a plural. (I have a Projects Controller, so I use "project" to avoid conflicting with it.)
Now, to access the :project parameter anywhere in my app, I use this function in my AppController:
function __currentProject(){
// Finding the current Project's Info
if(isset($this->params['project'])){
App::import('Model', 'Project');
$projectNames = new Project;
$projectNames->contain();
$projectInfo = $projectNames->find('first', array('conditions' => array('Project.slug' => $this->params['project'])));
$project_id = $projectInfo['Project']['id'];
$this->set('project_name_for_layout', $projectInfo['Project']['name']);
return $project_id;
}
}
And I utilize it in my other controllers:
function overview(){
$this->layout = 'project';
// Getting currentProject id from App Controller
$project_id = parent::__currentProject();
// Finding out what time it is and performing queries based on time.
$nowStamp = time();
$nowDate = date('Y-m-d H:i:s' , $nowStamp);
$twoWeeksFromNow = $nowDate + 1209600;
$lateMilestones = $this->Project->Milestone->find('all', array('conditions'=>array('Milestone.project_id' => $project_id, 'Milestone.complete'=> 0, 'Milestone.duedate <'=> $nowDate)));
$this->set(compact('lateMilestones'));
$currentProject = $this->Project->find('all', array('conditions'=>array('Project.slug' => $this->params['project'])));
$this->set(compact('currentProject'));
}
For your project you can try using a route like this at the end of your routes.php file:
Router::connect('/:groupname/:controller/:action/*', array(), array('groupname' => '[a-zA-Z0-9\-]+'));
// Notice I removed "/project" from the beginning. If you put the :groupname first, as I've done in the last example, then you only have one option for these custom url routes.
Then modify the other code to your needs.
If this is a public site, you may want to consider using named variables. This will allow you to define the group on the URL still, but without additional functionality requirements.
http://example.com/team/group:hr
http://example.com/team/action/group:hr/other:var
It may require custom routes too... but it should do the job.
http://book.cakephp.org/view/541/Named-parameters
http://book.cakephp.org/view/542/Defining-Routes
SESSIONS
Since web is stateless, you will need to use sessions (or cookies). The question you will need to ask yourself is how to reflect the selection (or not) of a specific department. It could be as simple as putting a drop down selection in the upper right that reflects ALL, HR, Sales, etc. When the drop down changes, it will set (or clear) the Group session variable.
As for the functionality in the controllers, you just check for the Session. If it is there, you limit the data by the select group. So you would use the same URLs, but the controller or model would manage how the data gets displayed.
// for all functionality use:
http://www.example.com/Team/action/id
http://www.example.com/Task/action/id
http://www.example.com/Equipment/action/id
You don't change the URL to accommodate for the functionality. That would be like using a different URL for every USER wanting to see their ADDRESS, PHONE NUMBER, or BILLING INFO. Where USER would be the group and ADDRESS, PHONE NUMBER< and BILLING INFO would be the item sets.
WITHOUT SESSIONS
The other option would be to put the Group filter on each page. So for example on Team/index view you would have a group drop down to filter the data. It would accomplish the same thing without having to set and clear session variables.
The conclusion is and the key thing to remember is that the functionality does not change nor does the URLs. The only thing that changes is that you will be working with filtered data sets.
Does that make sense?