You’ve written a PHP based web app, and you’ve made sure it doesn’t cause errors if the user submits unexpected values via any URLs or forms. But there’s something you quite likely forgot to test: What if the data that’s expected to be a singular value happens to be an array? If you assumed a GET or POST parameter will …
Going to review Zend Framework 1.8 Web Application Development
I was contacted by Packt Publishing to review a new Zend Framework book, Zend Framework 1.8 Web Application Development. I have previously reviewed Object-Oriented JavaScript, also published by Packt, which was a quality title so I’m looking forward to reading this ZF book. The book is written by Keith Pope, a web developer/project manager from the UK. I don’t yet …
Validating Zend_Forms using model objects
Zend_Forms, models, validation and how they all work together is a tricky topic. There are many opinions and many ways to do it. This time I’ll show you what I think could be the answer to validating forms without having to duplicate validation code both in a model class and in your form.
Making a custom front controller in Zend Framework
Firstly, apologies for the lack of posts lately. I’m pretty busy with various things right now, so I don’t have much time for blogging. Hopefully I’ll have some pretty interesting/cool stuff to show you later, though! Now, here’s something interesting I spotted recently: Creating a custom front controller for Zend Framework. Federico Cargnelutti is writing a series of posts on …
Integrating FCKeditor with Zend_Form
How to use FCKeditor, or any other WYSIWYG editor, with Zend_Form? Another relatively common question. There are many ways you can do this, but let’s look at these two as they are the best in my opinion: Adding some JavaScript to your view script Creating a Zend_Form_Decorator We’ll be using FCKeditor, but you can apply the techniques shown to others, …
Improving Ajax performance in Zend Framework applications
A common reason to use Ajax in a website is to make it feel faster, so you usually want Ajax requests be processed as quickly as possible. While there are many ways to speed up Zend Framework based applications, there are still some things like routing and dispatching which still add up to the total. There is, however, another way …
Zend_Controller actions that accept parameters?
In some MVC style frameworks the controller’s action methods take parameters in the method signature, ie. someMethod($userId) Zend Framework controllers do not – in ZF, you access parameters through the request object in the controller itself. I thought it would be nice to get the parameters you want in the method, so let’s check out how to do that and …
Database backed Zend_Form elements
A relatively common task when working with forms is filling select boxes or checkbox and radiobutton lists from a database. It’s not very tricky to query a database, and fill a Zend_Form element’s possible values from the resultset, but it can be quite boring and extraneous code…
We could also create an element which we can give some SQL, and it’ll fill itself automatically! This way you can even define database-backed elements in XML or INI configuration files.
Handling errors in Zend Framework
In Zend Framework based applications, error handling is typically done using the error controller, but there are different ways to send the execution to it – some better than others. Let’s look at some ways to trigger the error controller and how to have it handle different error conditions.
Zend_Acl part 3: creating and storing dynamic ACLs
In this third post of the series, I’ll talk about using dynamic ACLs: How to store an ACL in a database, and construct it from there when needed. We will first look at a simple example with users and pages, and then we’ll have a more complex example, involving building a much more complex ACL with inheritance, role types and other stuff.