Jan

I am currently working on upgrading a large CakePHP 1.3 application to CakePHP 2.2. Although the upgrade shell takes care of the most basics, there are still quite a lot of things to be done manually. I was told that upgrading is eventually worth the pain it brings, let’s hope so!

Up until now I have been mostly debugging stuff from my error logs (both Cake and Apache), fixing deprecated syntaxes, upgrading used plugins, clearing out and repopulating my ACL tables and now I’m working on finding/replacing some deprecated stuff. Up until now, I have come up with 2 massive find/replace operations that I found pretty useful and would like to write up here for my own future reference, maybe helping other people facing the same upgrade issues as well.

When working with querystring parameters, with 1.3 these used to be under:

$this->request->params['url']

But they are now under:

$this->request->query

which makes more sense anyway. Therefor I did a massive find/replace on the above.

Furthermore, the Paginator’s sort method now takes it’s arguments in reverse order, which causes all your paginated views to have their raw model/field names displayed, rather than the label you once provided. I’m not sure why the upgrade shell does not fix this, but using this find/replace regexes (for PhpStorm) made life easier for me:

Find:

\$this->Paginator->sort\('([^']+)', '([^']+)'\);

Replace:

\\$this->Paginator->sort('\$2', '\$1');

This basically finds the two arguments of the sort method (matching anything that’s not the closing quote) and then swapping capture groups 2 and 1. Works like a charm. Using phpStorm’s “Replace in path” function you can replace all instances in your entire project in less than a minute.

The final step is to inspect all my views for any flaws I might see and then have my colleagues help me test everything to see if it all went well. Fingers crossed. If I encounter any other issues of general interest, I will update this post.

Recently I’ve discussed this code in the #cakephp IRC channel to someone who was looking to achieve to create a CakePHP contact form, but was struggling with it a little. I then put my code on the pastebin and decided to post it here as well. Might help other people with the same issue.

What we’ll be doing is creating a simple contact form following CakePHP conventions and using the benefit of Cake’s validation rules. It’s actually quite simple to achieve this.

The first thing you’ll want to be doing is to determine what fields your form will need to have and which of those are required and optional. Once you’re clear on that, you can start writing up your model. The model will not actually save the message to the database (although it could if you’d want to save a copy there), but it will just validate the submitted data. In my case the required fields were name, email and message. Here’s the model that goes with it.

class Contact extends AppModel {
 
    var $name = 'Contact';
    var $useTable = false;
 
    var $validate = array(
        'name' => array(
            'rule' => 'notEmpty',
            'message' => 'You have not entered your name.'
        ),
        'email' => array(
            'rule' => 'email',
            'message' => 'You have entered an invalid e-mail address.'
        ),
        'message' => array(
            'rule' => 'notEmpty',
            'message' => 'You did not enter a message.'
        )
    );
}

Next up, in order to actually get our validation rules to work, we’ll need to tell our controller to validate the data before e-mailing it. Furthermore, we’ll need to tell our controller to use Cake’s Email component and set the required parameters to send it. If you’re not familiar with the Email component, I suggest your read the cookbook’s article on it. Here’s what the controller looks like.

class ContactsController extends Controller {
 
    var $components = array('Email');
 
    function send() {
        if(!empty($this->data)) {
            $this->Contact->set($this->data);
 
            if($this->Contact->validates()) {
                if(!empty($this->data['Contact']['company'])) {
                    $this->Email->from = $this->data['Contact']['company'] . ' - ' . $this->data['Contact']['name'] . ' <' . $this->data['Contact']['email'] . '>';
                } else {
                    $this->Email->from = $this->data['Contact']['name'] . ' <' . $this->data['Contact']['email'] . '>';
                }
                $this->Email->to = 'email@example.com';
                $this->Email->subject = 'Website request';
                $this->Email->send($this->data['Contact']['message']);
                $this->Session->setFlash('Your message has been sent.');
                // Display the success.ctp page instead of the form again
                $this->render('success');
            } else {
                $this->render('index');
            }
        }
    }
 
    function index() {
        // Placeholder for index. No actual action here, everything is submitted to the send function.
    }
 
}

Finally, we need our views to show the form and the success message if the message was sent. This is most likely to look different in your case, but just for the complete picture, I’ll share them with you anyway.

app/views/contacts/index.ctp

<p>Thank you for your interest in our company. Leave a message.</p>
<?php echo $this->Form->create('Contact', array('action' => 'send')); ?>
<table style="border:none;">
    <tr>
        <td>Name</td>
        <td><?php echo $this->Form->input('Contact.name', array('label' => false, 'maxlength' => 100, 'size' => 40)); ?></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>Company</td>
        <td><?php echo $this->Form->input('Contact.company', array('label' => false, 'maxlength' => 100, 'size' => 40)); ?></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>E-Mail</td>
        <td><?php echo $this->Form->input('Contact.email', array('label' => false, 'maxlength' => 100, 'size' => 40)); ?></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td style="vertical-align: top;">Your comment</td>
        <td><?php echo $this->Form->input('Contact.message', array('label' => false, 'cols' => 50, 'rows' => 10)); ?></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td colspan="2" align="center"><br><?php echo $this->Form->end('Send'); ?></td>
    </tr>
</table>

app/views/contacts/success.ctp

<?php
echo $this->Session->flash();
?>
<p>Thank you, we'll get back to you shortly.</p>

That’s all! A nice and simple contact form with proper field validation.