milesjohnson

If you are a CakePHP developer, I am almost certain you have run into this problem on multiple occasions. What problem are you referring to you ask? Well, the problem that you have when your Model is not being found and Cake automatically substitutes it with AppModel. Here's how to fix those problems. Continue reading...

More times then none when working with a database, you need a general purpose method for grabbing fields from a row that matches an id. Cake has built in magic methods based on the table column that do just that, for example findById() or findBySlug(), but sometimes it grabs associated data that you do not want. Below is a basic method that you can place in your AppModel to grab a row based on its id, with optional parameters for restricting what fields to grab or what associations to contain. Continue reading...

About a week ago I talked about automatically sanitizing your data before its saved. Now I want to talk about automatically stripping HTML from your data before its saved, which is good practice. Personally, I hate saving any type of HTML to a database, thats why I prefer a BB code type system for this website. Continue reading...

So if you are like me and hate having to sanitize or clean your data manually within each action, and was hoping there was an easier way, there is. Simple combine the magic of the Models beforeSave() and the powerful strength of Sanitize::clean(). Continue reading...

Since Cake's default Model validation really doesn't support files that well, we have to build the methods our self. Right now I will be showing you how to validate an images dimensions. The method will either check the width, the height or both width and height. Continue reading...

So lately I have been delving into the cacheing capabilities of CakePHP. Most, if not all of its capabilities work wonderfully; although I personally can't get into $cacheAction (within the controllers). The $cacheAction property only works for static and non-user generated pages, in other terms, any content that changes depending on a logged in user wont work correctly with $cacheAction (unless you want thousands and thousands of cache files). So I stopped using $cacheAction all together in my latest application, and instead built a method that caches individual queries, instead of the whole page. Continue reading...

In some cases, you want to grab extra data in the find() method by calling an SQL statement like COUNT() AS, or SELECT(). When you do this, your extra data is not nested in the Model index of your resulted array. Here's how to fix that problem. Continue reading...

When I first started using CakePHP, I couldn't find a way to pre-populate a form with data. Why would I need this you ask? Well its simple, it would be used to edit something already existent. So what I need to do is grab the data from the database, and then populate the form. Took me a few hours to figure out how to do it, the guide really didn't explain how it should be done (or I just overlooked it). To have the data populate, all you need to do is to set $this->data to the database result. Continue reading...

Recently I was working on a project, where a certain controller had over 15ish+ different models. The problem is that each action needed a different model, and I didn't want to load all those models at once. Here's how to load models, specific to certain actions. Continue reading...

When a form is submitted in CakePHP, any errors that fail the model validation are displayed after each respective input field. But if you're like me and really dislike that structure and output, and would rather have your errors displayed in a list above the form, then this is how you do it. Continue reading...