Re: Assigning, accessing and comparing viewVars in a controller...

[brian]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 1:24 PM, gestejim.ho...@gmail.com wrote:

 Brian,

 Many thanks.  I got over a bit of a hump on this on Friday with your
 help.  I do of course have another n00b follow up question :)

 I am using the authake plug-in for group-based authorization (this
 nice plug-in has been taken over by Marco Sbragi and is on CakeForge:
 http://cakeforge.org/projects/authake2/

 I has a number of functions such as getLogin() and isPermitted() that
 seem to work in views.  For example, I can user getLogin() to display
 user ID on the menu page with

   echo $authak3-getLogin()

 However, if I try to access the same function in my
 menus_controller.php with:

  $testuser = $authak3-getLogin();

 I then get a completely empty page/view.

 I am trying to determine if there is some sort of a general rule about
 scope of functions between controller and view that makes the whole
 thing bomb if I reference it from controller.

 One thing I am guessing is relevant is that Authake is referenced in
 the app_controller.php in a BeforeFilter() like so:

        $this-Authake-beforeFilter($this);

That's because the View knows about $authak3, the Helper, but
AppController has a handle on AuthakeComponent. I've never used the
plugin but I had a look at it just now. You can access the same data
in your controllers with $this-Authake-getLogin(), etc. Have a look
through controllers/components/authake.php for the other stuff that it
exposes. Compare that to plugins/views/helpers/authak3.php

 and all links/controllers are checked against Authake right from the
 start.  The trick is that I want to check all possible menu links for
 access right *before* I add the link to viewVars-Menu for the view to
 render.  I could access this authake3-isPermitted($menulink) in the
 view, but then I would wind up adding a pretty fair amount of logic
 like menu table queries to the view.  I'm trying to make as much of
 that work in the controller as I can.

It looks like you can get that from the component with
$this-Authake-isAllowed(...).

 So any, broad clue about this appreciated. My question was starting to
 get somewhat Authake-specific, but I think I am probably missing
 something very general, very basic.

Some of it's basic--keeping components and helpers straight (and I
still get mixed up)--but having a concrete plugin (mini-app) as an
example is actually pretty helpful. And the Authake-specific stuff is
actually pretty important. I recently created a similar app using ACL,
where the menu changes drastically between groups. Make sure to look
into view caching so your controller can skip a lot of querying. You
can name each view for the group_id, for instance. This makes it easy
to delete when something Group-specific changes.

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Re: Assigning, accessing and comparing viewVars in a controller...

[geste]

Brian,

Many thanks.  I got over a bit of a hump on this on Friday with your
help.  I do of course have another n00b follow up question :)

I am using the authake plug-in for group-based authorization (this
nice plug-in has been taken over by Marco Sbragi and is on CakeForge:
http://cakeforge.org/projects/authake2/

I has a number of functions such as getLogin() and isPermitted() that
seem to work in views.  For example, I can user getLogin() to display
user ID on the menu page with

   echo $authak3-getLogin()

However, if I try to access the same function in my
menus_controller.php with:

  $testuser = $authak3-getLogin();

I then get a completely empty page/view.

I am trying to determine if there is some sort of a general rule about
scope of functions between controller and view that makes the whole
thing bomb if I reference it from controller.

One thing I am guessing is relevant is that Authake is referenced in
the app_controller.php in a BeforeFilter() like so:

$this-Authake-beforeFilter($this);

and all links/controllers are checked against Authake right from the
start.  The trick is that I want to check all possible menu links for
access right *before* I add the link to viewVars-Menu for the view to
render.  I could access this authake3-isPermitted($menulink) in the
view, but then I would wind up adding a pretty fair amount of logic
like menu table queries to the view.  I'm trying to make as much of
that work in the controller as I can.

So any, broad clue about this appreciated. My question was starting to
get somewhat Authake-specific, but I think I am probably missing
something very general, very basic.

Jim


On Aug 7, 6:49 pm, brian bally.z...@gmail.com wrote:
 Controller::set(), as you can see, adds a variable with the supplied
 name  value to the $viewVars array which, in turn, is made available
 to the View object. However, you're not creating a *local* variable
 with the given name  value. For that, you'd need to first asign it to
 a variable, then use set() to make it available to the View:

 $foo = 'bar';
 $this-set('foo', $foo);

 If you need to set several vars for the view but need to use them in
 the controller, you can do:

 $foo = 'foo';
 $bar = 'bar';
 ...
 $this-set(compact('foo', 'bar'));

 ... which will do the same thing.

 One other thing you should know about: Cake will screw with your
 variable names if you're not careful. If there's an underscore in the
 variable name and you use compact(), you have to take an extra measure
 or Cake will create a camel-cased variable name (no, I don't
 understand why). So, if you do:

 $this-set(compact('foo_bar'));

 ... you'll end up with a $fooBar variable in the View instead of
 $foo_bar. To avoid this, do:

 $foo_bar = 'whatever';
 $this-set(compact('foo_bar'), false);

 On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 6:03 PM, gestejim.ho...@gmail.com wrote:

  Sometimes I hit myself with a small, embarrassing clue stick
  immediately after posting.

  I thought I had tried using $this-viewVars['whatever' ] in my find
  conditions and that it just didn't work.

  But I just tried that little test of:

   $this-set('menu_link', /budgets );
   $this-set('menu_name', $this-viewVars['menu_link']);

  and it does seem to work. (menu_name gets set to /budgets)

  So I think I need to go back and rework my find() conditions to try
  $this-viewVars[whatever] again

  Any other comments about the validity of using $this-viewVars in
  controller logic welcome.

  Jim
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Assigning, accessing and comparing viewVars in a controller...

[geste]

Background:  i am trying to build a little database-driven 2-level
menu system that checks authorization to access menu pages and actions
*before* they are displayed.  If you are not authorized to use the
budgets table in any way, you won't be presented with a budgets
menus option (I am using Authake for the auth function)

To stick with MVC convention, I figured I should put as much of the DB
access and auth in my menus controller.  I would use find() with
some complex conditions to extract only the set of menus that I wanted
a user to get.  I had problems with my conditions in find() and I
concluded I didn't understand it well enough -- maybe a fundamental
misunderstanding about variable scope and what could be sent in to a
query via find().

So I backed up and  added

   echo pre; print_r($this-viewVars);echo /pre;?

to my default.ctp so I could see what vars were being set in my
controller:

I am using routes and using URL comparison to select menu records from
the database.  I can set this in the controller:

  $this-set('current_uri', $_SERVER[REQUEST_URI]);

The idea is to use URL to set parent menu and then query all parent
+child menu records.

But when I went to use $current_uri it in a find(all, [conditions])
the find simply failed  So I did another test.  I can set:

  $this-set('menu_link', /budgets );

but when I subsequently try to do this set in the next line in the
controller:

  $this-set('menu_name', $menu_link );

I see menu_name in viewVars, but it has no value.  I get the same no-
value result if I use:

  $this-set('menu_name', $this-menu_link );

All this tells me that there is something really basic this perpetual
n00b doesn't understand  about scope of vars in viewVars and/or how
they can be compared or set in the controller.

Any thumps with the clue stick appreciated.

Jim









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Re: Assigning, accessing and comparing viewVars in a controller...

[geste]

Sometimes I hit myself with a small, embarrassing clue stick
immediately after posting.

I thought I had tried using $this-viewVars['whatever' ] in my find
conditions and that it just didn't work.

But I just tried that little test of:

  $this-set('menu_link', /budgets );
  $this-set('menu_name', $this-viewVars['menu_link']);

and it does seem to work. (menu_name gets set to /budgets)

So I think I need to go back and rework my find() conditions to try
$this-viewVars[whatever] again

Any other comments about the validity of using $this-viewVars in
controller logic welcome.

Jim


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Re: Assigning, accessing and comparing viewVars in a controller...

[brian]

Controller::set(), as you can see, adds a variable with the supplied
name  value to the $viewVars array which, in turn, is made available
to the View object. However, you're not creating a *local* variable
with the given name  value. For that, you'd need to first asign it to
a variable, then use set() to make it available to the View:

$foo = 'bar';
$this-set('foo', $foo);

If you need to set several vars for the view but need to use them in
the controller, you can do:

$foo = 'foo';
$bar = 'bar';
...
$this-set(compact('foo', 'bar'));

... which will do the same thing.

One other thing you should know about: Cake will screw with your
variable names if you're not careful. If there's an underscore in the
variable name and you use compact(), you have to take an extra measure
or Cake will create a camel-cased variable name (no, I don't
understand why). So, if you do:

$this-set(compact('foo_bar'));

... you'll end up with a $fooBar variable in the View instead of
$foo_bar. To avoid this, do:

$foo_bar = 'whatever';
$this-set(compact('foo_bar'), false);


On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 6:03 PM, gestejim.ho...@gmail.com wrote:

 Sometimes I hit myself with a small, embarrassing clue stick
 immediately after posting.

 I thought I had tried using $this-viewVars['whatever' ] in my find
 conditions and that it just didn't work.

 But I just tried that little test of:

  $this-set('menu_link', /budgets );
  $this-set('menu_name', $this-viewVars['menu_link']);

 and it does seem to work. (menu_name gets set to /budgets)

 So I think I need to go back and rework my find() conditions to try
 $this-viewVars[whatever] again

 Any other comments about the validity of using $this-viewVars in
 controller logic welcome.

 Jim


 


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