All new CakePHP Tips Summer 2014

For CakePHP2.x

Awesome CakePHP

Check out this all new awesome CakePHP list: awesome-cakephp
Star it, fork it, enhance it 🙂

Note the cake3 branch that will proabably soon be filled rapidly with all new shiny CakePHP3 resources and plugins.

There are also a few more generic awesome lists links in there.

CakeFest 2014 coming up

Check it out – and be part of it. You can read about last year’s event here.

This year is going to be awesome (again that word^^). And not only regarding the temperatures in Madrid 😉
A few well connected people like @philsturgeon pulled some strings and the event is listed on sites like php.net.
Let’s make this the largest fest ever.

Note: My attendance app only lists a very small subset of all people actually joining the event!

Finally a book on CakePHP2.5+

CakePHP Core Developer @josegonzalez wrote a cool book on CakePHP: Rapid Application Development with CakePHP 2.
It has some real insight in topics that are not covered by the online CakePHP documentation.

Hot tip: Use the promo code DEREUROMARK when purchasing the bundle to get 20% off your purchase!

Deployment with composer and script hooks

This is already widely used in Symfony2, for example.
Here it fires the following scripts after installing/updating to clear the cache and re-build assets etc:

"scripts" : {
    "post-install-cmd" : [
        "Incenteev\\ParameterHandler\\ScriptHandler::buildParameters",
        "Sensio\\Bundle\\DistributionBundle\\Composer\\ScriptHandler::buildBootstrap",
        "Sensio\\Bundle\\DistributionBundle\\Composer\\ScriptHandler::clearCache",
        "Sensio\\Bundle\\DistributionBundle\\Composer\\ScriptHandler::installAssets",
        "Sensio\\Bundle\\DistributionBundle\\Composer\\ScriptHandler::installRequirementsFile"
    ],

The list of available commands be found here: getcomposer.org/doc/articles/scripts.md

Why not leveraging this for your Cake2.x app, as well?
You could re-built AssetCompress files, clear the persistent/model cache, run custom post-update hooks and so on. (DB) Migration could also be hooked in this way.

Post links inside Forms

Most probably didn’t see this change. But it allows postLink() to be used inside forms now.
The issue was, that forms don’t work inside forms. And that post links contain those inline, breaking the form around it.

You can now easily create "Delete" links or other POST links inside your forms. It can write the forms to a View block which you can output later on then.
All you need to do is set 'inline' => false:

echo $this->Form->postLink('Delete', array('action' => 'delete', 1), array('inline' => false));

And output your buffered View block after closing the form:

echo $this->View->fetch('postLink');

This also works with multiple postLink() calls. The View block would simply contain all of the forms then.

Prevent internal field names

I try to stay away from internal framework used names for fields. Once you attach Search plugin or any other additional functionality on top of your
actions, this could get messy otherwise.
The Paginator, for instance, uses "limit", "sort", "direction", "page". In order for them to not conflict with search fields on existing fields, I avoid them and
use "order" instead of "sort" or "max" instead of "limit" for field names. In case this is not avoidable or a legacy DB schema, one can add the model prefix, though: "MyModelName.sort" and would also be able to resolve the conflict. But if you can already do so in hindsight it is probably smarter.

Array and ArrayObject

The new CakePHP3 core uses ArrayObject already quite a bit.
In 2.x you probably don’t use it too much yet. But it is wise to voice a warning regarding on some flaws of ArrayObject.
This article describes it.
Basically, empty() and ArrayObject don’t play nice. It only works with count():

if (count($options)) {
    // Yes
} else {
    // No / empty
}

The alternative would be to cast it prior to checking on it: (array)$options. Then empty() would work again.

The same issue you might face in index views and alike, where you want to display a subsitute text if no records can be listed in the pagination yet:

if (empty($users) { // BAD - better use count() here then.
    echo 'No users enlisted so far';
}

This would also always fail now in CakePHP 3 without any indication whatsoever as objects replaced the arrays and render empty() invalid as check here.

The rest of those issues in the article are also quite interesting. Check them out, as well.

A complete list of "flaws" has been put together on this page. It reads like the bible of Anti-PHP, tough 🙂
Quite entertaining even in some parts. I would just read it as an informative page, though. It is good to know those things, but it is also easy to avoid or work-around them.

MySQL and returning integers

Some probably wondered why integers and other non-stringish values is often returned as string.
This has nothing to do with CakePHP itself, but with the PDO extension of PHP underneath.

But you can easily disable that with the following flags in your database.php config:

'flags' => array(
        PDO::ATTR_STRINGIFY_FETCHES => false,
        PDO::ATTR_EMULATE_PREPARES => false
    )

UUIDs as char36 vs binary16

UUIDs (Universally Unique Identifier) can be used as an alternative to the normal AutoIncrement IDs for primary keys. Use them wisely, they are larger and slower than than the AIIDs.
But if you use them, try to prevent char36.
According to tests such as storing-billions-uuid-fields-mysql-innodb, it is 6-8 times faster to use binary(16) instead of char(36) for UUIDs.
CakePHP 2.x+ supports binary just fine.

PHPUnit and Windows

You might have seen something as descibed in this issue: Weird output in your console when running unit tests.
This is mainly because the default setting for PHPUnit in the phpunit.xml(.dist) file is usually colors="true".
You can easily overwrite it in your own file and the weird output stops:

<phpunit
    colors="false"
    ...

Or you can try to use the library linked in that ticket. I didn’t try that one yet.