Table of Contents - Yii Application Development Cookbook

This book is a collection of Yii recipes grouped in 13 chapters generally independent of each other.

Second edition

In the second edition many recipes were updated and rewritten to reflect latest Yii and PHP world changes and improve overall experience. Additionally all errata from the first edition was fixed.

There are some totally new recipes. These are underlined in table of contents.

Chapter 1, Under the Hood

Will tell you about most interesting Yii features hidden under the hood: events, import, autoloading, exceptions, component and widget configuration and more.

Using getters and setters
Using Yii events
Using import and autoloading
Using exceptions
Configuring components
Configuring widget defaults
Using Yii core collections
Working with requests

Chapter 2, Router, Controller, and Views

This chapter is about handy things about Yii URL router, controllers, and views: URL rules, external actions and controllers, view clips, decorators and more.

Configuring URL rules
Generating URLs by path
Using regular expressions in URL rules
Creating URL rules for static pages
Providing your own URL rules at runtime
Using base controller
Using external actions
Displaying static pages with CViewAction
Using flash messages
Using controller context in a view
Reusing views with partials
Using clips
Using decorators
Defining multiple layouts
Paginating and sorting data

Chapter 3, AJAX and jQuery

Yii’s client side is built with jQuery — the widely used, powerful, and simple to learn JavaScript library. This chapter focuses on Yii-specific tricks rather than jQuery itself.

Loading a block through AJAX
Managing assets
Including resources into the page
Working with JSON
Passing configuration from PHP to JavaScript
Handling variable number of inputs
Rendering content at the client side

Chapter 4, Working with Forms

Yii makes working with forms a breeze and documentation on it is almost complete. Still there are some areas that need clarification and examples. Some of the topics covered in this chapter are creating own validators and input widgets, uploading files, using and customizing CAPTCHA.

Writing your own validators
Uploading files
Adding CAPTCHA
Customizing CAPTCHA
Creating a custom input widget with CInputWidget

Chapter 5, Testing Your Application

This chapter covers both unit testing, functional testing and generating code coverage reports. Recipes are following test driven development approach: you'll write tests for several small applications and then will implement functionality.

Setting up the testing environment
Writing and running unit tests
Using fixtures
Testing the application with functional tests
Generating code coverage reports

Chapter 6, Database, Active Record, and Model Tricks

In this chapter you’ll learn how to work with database efficiently, when to use models and when not to, how to work with multiple databases, how to automatically pre-process Active Record fields and how to use powerful database criteria.

Getting data from a database
Defining and using multiple DB connections
Using scopes to get models for different languages
Processing model fields with AR event-like methods
Applying markdown and HTML
Highlighting code with Yii
Automating timestamps
Setting an author automatically
Implementing single table inheritance
Using CDbCriteria

Chapter 7, Using Zii Components

This chapter covers data providers, grids and lists: how to configure sorting and search, how to use grids with multiple related models, how to create your own column types and more.

Using data providers
Using grids
Using lists
Creating custom grid columns

Chapter 8, Extending Yii

Shows not only how to implement your own Yii extension but how to make your extension reusable and useful for community. Also we’ll focus on many things you should do to make your extension as efficient as possible.

Creating model behaviors
Creating components
Creating reusable controller actions
Creating reusable controllers
Creating a widget
Creating CLI commands
Creating filters
Creating modules
Creating a custom view renderer
Making extensions distribution-ready

Chapter 9, Error Handling, Debugging, and Logging

In this chapter we will review logging, analysing exception stack trace and will implement our own error handler.

Using different log routes
Analyzing the Yii error stack trace
Logging and using the context information
Implementing your own smart 404 handler

Chapter 10, Security

You’ll learn how to keep your application secure according to general web application security principle “filter input escape output”. We’ll cover such topics as creating your own controller filters, preventing XSS, CSRF and SQL injections, escaping output and using role based access control.

Using controller filters
Using CHtml and CHtmlPurifier to prevent XSS
Preventing SQL injections
Preventing CSRF
Using RBAC

Chapter 11, Performance Tuning

In this chapter we’ll show how to configure Yii to gain extra performance. Also you’ll learn some best practices of developing an application that will run smooth until you have very high loads.

Following best practices
Speeding up sessions handling
Using cache dependencies and chains
Profiling an application with Yii
Leveraging HTTP caching

Chapter 12, Using External Code

Focuses on using third party code with Yii. We'll use Zend Framework, Kohana and PEAR but you'll be able to use any code after learning how it works.

Using Zend Framework from Yii
Customizing the Yii autoloader
Using Kohana inside Yii
Using PEAR inside Yii
Using Composer with Yii

Chapter 13, Deployment

Covers various tips that are especially useful on application deployment, when developing application in team or when you just want to make your development environment more comfortable.

Changing the Yii directories layout
Moving an application out of webroot
Sharing the framework directory
Moving configuration parts into separate files
Using multiple configurations to simplify the deployment
Implementing and executing cron jobs
Maintenance mode

First edition