Where do you guys put your static pages, like "home", in an MVC framework? Do you have a "home" controller? A "pages" controller? Do you create actions for each static page?
I'm using CFWheels now, and I'm trying to figure out the best place to put them.
Edit: Apparently CFWheels doesn't require you to create actions for all your views. So you can just create an empty controller and call the views like actions, but not have to write out the blank functions.
CakePHP (and I guess, Ruby On Rails) has a "pages" controller. There is a routing function which redirects requests to /pages/foo to /pages/display/foo. Similarly, / is redirected to /pages/display/home. The display action looks up the views/pages folder for any file with a matching name and renders that.
At the end of the day, a static page is a view without a model, that was returned based on an action the user requested from your server by hitting particular route. :-)
Yes, technically you could expose the direct location of the view resource to the user and rely on the http daemon to go fetch it and return it. However, that means that the resource URL is now tied not to the semantic of the resource you want to expose, but to actual bits. This means that if you want another representation of that same resource, you have to expose it on a different URL.
So, when you create the structure of your web app, think first about the URLs and the resources you want to expose and then think how to implement each resource.
I put my static pages in the database using a simple CMS with a private admin page.
This way, the clients can make simple changes themselves.
In Wheels, you don't even need to create the controller file.
If you create your view here:
views/about/index.cfm
You don't need to create the controller file at all. Then you should be able to just call this with no problems:
http://www.example.com/about
Related
I only started with this a couple of days ago, so this may be a silly question...
I have an admin area with its own directory "admin" within the controller folder. So if the user is in the admin area, I want a sidebar to show. But obviously there will be a fair few "pages" (controllers) within the admin area. I have Clients, Services and Dashboard.
In the sidebar (on all pages) I want a list of clients and services so when clicked, it goes to a page and display info for that client/service.
I sort of have it working with add_service(), edit_service(), view_services() etc... but in each of these methods, it seems like I need to load services AND clients models, and pass the data back to each view... in all methods? So if I want to add a service, I click "add service" and it takes me to the add_service(). Do I need the below 4 lines in each method?
$this->load->model('client_model');
$this->load->model('services_model');
$data['clients'] = $this->client_model->get_clients();
$data['services'] = $this->services_model->get_services();
I have read about widgets, but not sure if that's what I need exactly.
Thanks
As you read, all you need is HMVC. This will create a "widget" with your controller, model and views, and you'll be able of calling "a whole": A part of the website wich manage its own part.
One solution is implement https://bitbucket.org/wiredesignz/codeigniter-modular-extensions-hmvc into your code, you create a module called "client", and in your "admin" controller you call it. You'll get your client table there, and in your controller "client" you'll be able of call it too, and you'll have exactly the same behaviour. I've implemented wiredesignz HMVC quite times and I think is the solution for your trouble. Anyway, you could also check https://github.com/Bigwebmaster/codeigniter-modular-extensions-hmvc, which is a fork with improvements into the code.
About your sidebar, you'll have to call the widget you'll create with your clients, and you'll have it quickly with only one call, because the module will manage all the behaviour
I have been coding in php for a year now and i have recently decided to start learning Ruby because i heard its a better web language. I'm trying to convert what i have on the website so far into Ruby code, but I'm having trouble understanding the structure for controllers views and models. Heres what i have for php pages.
Homepage(controller)
- index page
- about page
- etc.
Signup(controller)
- index page for signup
Signin(controller)
index page for signin
Admin Page(controller)
Business Page(controller)
Do i make all these controllers and what do the actions and models represent? Is the action the form to signup.
Thanks in advance
I'll try my best to give a condensed answer. RoR follows the MVC pattern (Model, View, Controller) typically controllers handle url requests, models store data and views are used to display the data to the end user. To answer your question, you would not need to create seperate controllers for each individual action. Controllers contain methods for creating, reading, updating, deleting (CRUD) and much more. For example: You might have a UsersController, within this controller are four methods; create, new, update, and delete. This would give you a URL something like /users/new /users/1/edit /users/1/delete
An application like the one you give as an example is quite simple. to seperate an "admin" page is simple and would be something like
<%= if current_user.admin? %>
content only the admin can see
<% end %>
Creating users would involve storing their details in the database, creating a session and allowing users to create and destroy sessions when they login and logout.
The major difference between RoR and PHP (to me, anyway) is PHP makes the views messy by embedding logic code directly into the .html page. Ruby on Rails provides a clean way of seperating logic from html content making it easier to manage or develop between a group.
Pages such as the root page, and about page or contact page might all be methods in the HomeController and would be accesible via /home/index /home/about /home/contact
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html
The above link would be the best place to start learning about the fundamentals.
Is it possible to extend Yii URL routes and rules through a Controller on the fly, or by extending the CController class itself?
I am really stuck with this, have not tried anything.
How to do this in/with Yii?
First you should be aware of what URL rules are used for:
Parsing an incoming URL. The urlManager component resolves a URL to a route so that Yii can call the right action in a specific controller and module.
Creating URLs from calls to createUrl() in your code.
Considering (1) above it is obvious, that you can not add URL rules in your controller if you want to use these URLs in your application. It's much too late, as Yii already has gone through the process of resolving a request to a route. Even if you'd only wanted to create URLs it doesn't make much sense as your application will never understand them.
The correct way to bring more dynamics into your URL parsing/creation is to use a custom URL rule class. In there you can write any code you want to create and parse even the most complex URLs. The topic is described in the manual.
I've an existing MVC3 project that implements a certain functionality, this project has it's own views, and a separate Database.
now I'm required to use the same functionality inside one of my orchard project,so I thought that I can host this solution in somewhere and view it inside an iframe or something.
Am I thinking right?,
is this the correct step to take in order to achieve this requirement inside Orchard?
to make it more clear, all I need to do is to view this solution and interact with it's controls and views from a hosting page inside orchard, and the subsequent requests should be handled by my solution in order to hit it's own data store and get back with the requested data in order to be displayed to the user.
any help would be appreciated.
Update:
thanks for Bertrand Le Roy for his answer, I can now view my solution inside my
orchard website.
I came in to one more HUGE problem, which is that my application can no longer connect to my external database.
I've a DB that is hosted in some where else, and I'm using EntityFramework to deal with it.
the problem is that if I put the connection string inside my module web.config, or main orchard web.config, I run into several types of errors like:
"System.Reflection.TargetException: Object does not match target type."
or
"System.Data.MetadataException: Unable to load the specified metadata resource."
My question is: How could I pass my connectionstring correctly to my solution, assuming that I'm using Entity framework as my ORM.
Many thanks.
You will need to put it into a module.
You will have to move route definitions to a Routes.cs file (look at any existing such file for examples).
You will also need, in order to access your data store, to opt out of the ambient Orchard transaction around the data access code (using (var scope = new TransactionScope(TransactionScopeOption.Suppress))).
If you are using dependency injection, you may have some work to move that to the Autofac-based way of doing things in Orchard.
If you want your work to appear seamlessly in the Orchard admin, you may want to decorate your admin controllers with the Admin attribute. If you want your front-end to use the current theme, you'll have to add Themed attributes and maybe refactor your views so that they only emit HTML for the content zone instead of for the whole page.
Add a manifest (module.txt) to your module folder and you should be good to go.
I'm new to OOPHP and frameworks at all.
I'm just wondering...
I have few controllers:
dashboard
signup
login and few more
I've put them into users directory. Everything is working correctly, I'm just wondering if I should put everything in one controller and signup, etc. should be a method of users controller? Or am I doing it correct way?
Regards,
M
It's totally up to you. The stuff you currently have could probably all go into one controller (user controller in this case), but it can build up to request the separation you already have, e.g. separate controller for each action, grouped by a prefix.
Good thing about kohana is that it allows you to do stuff like this the way you want to, there isn't a single guideline about putting many 'common' actions into the same controller; do it as you like / find appropriate.