A friend of mine asked for a custom website, so here I am, writing a custom cms. I know, there are plenty of systems out there that would handle his needs, but it’s also a good excuse to play around with CakePHP 3, so here we are.

For the lazy, the codebase we’ll be working on will be available on GitHub. I will be pushing each set of changes on the date when each blog post in this series is published. No cheating!

Updating Plugins

Before we continue, lets be sure we’ve updated all our plugins. I like to do this each day so that I can get any bugfixes that come out for libraries my application depends upon. If there are any bugfixes for dependencies, we’ll grab those with the following composer command:

composer update

Typically you would run tests at this stage, but since we have yet to write any, that isn’t necessary.

Let’s commit any updates:

git add composer.lock git commit -m "Update unpinned dependencies"

You should always verify your application still works after upgrading dependencies.

Duplicative Logic

In the process of adding a new post type, I noticed that there is a bit of duplication between the PostsListener::beforeSave() and the AbstractPostType::_execute() method. Specifically, we’re not even using the _execute() logic in our save. I’m going to refactor it with the following goals:

Save logic belongs with Crud, so it will be removed from both the PostsListener and AbstractPostType classes.

and classes. Extra data from the request should be injected at the PostsListener level.

level. The data that we’ll actually save should be returned by the AbstractPostType::execute() method.

method. We should be able to lean on our PostType validation rules as much as possible.

Dropping extra code in PostsListener::beforeSave()

This is the PostsListener::beforeSave()

/** * Before Save * * @param \Cake\Event\Event $event Event * @return void */ public function beforeSave(Event $event) { $type = $event->subject->entity->type; if (empty($type)) { $passedArgs = $this->_request()->param('pass'); $type = $passedArgs[0]; } $event->subject->entity->type = $type; $data = [ 'user_id' => $this->_controller()->Auth->user('id'), 'type' => $type, ] + $this->_request()->data() + ['published_date' => Time::now()]; $postType = $event->subject->entity->getPostType(); $data = $postType->execute($data); $PostsTable = TableRegistry::get('Posts'); $PostsTable->patchEntity($event->subject->entity, $data); }

In it, you’ll see I can still inject data from the request - user_id , type , published_date - but also get the “real” data from the specific PostType::execute() method. As it’s the Crud.beforeSave event, we don’t actually need to save data, and just patching it onto the event’s entity is enough.

Restructuring AbstractPostType::_execute()

This is my new AbstractPostType::_execute() method:

protected function _execute(array $data) { if (empty($data['post_attributes'])) { $data['post_attributes'] = []; } $PostsTable = TableRegistry::get('Posts'); $AttributesTable = TableRegistry::get('PostAttributes'); $postAttributes = $data['post_attributes']; $postColumns = $PostsTable->schema()->columns(); $validColumns = $this->schema()->fields(); foreach ($data as $key => $value) { if (in_array($key, $postColumns)) { continue; } unset($data[$key]); if (!in_array($key, $validColumns)) { continue; } $postAttributes[] = [ 'name' => $key, 'value' => $value, ]; } $data['post_attributes'] = $postAttributes; return $data; }

A bit more going on here:

We’re assuming there will always be at least an empty set of post_attributes .

. If a key is both not a valid post column and not a valid post-type field, then we drop it.

We’re no longer creating a PostAttribute Entity, and instead allowing the PostsTable->patchEntity() call in the PostsListener::beforeSave() to properly martial the data.

With these two changes in place, you can test saving a post and everything should be just fine. Let’s commit:

git add src/Listener/PostsListener.php src/PostType/AbstractPostType.php git commit -m "Clean up post marshalling and saving"

Allowing Post Data Modification

In our upcoming post type - the PhotoPostType - we’ll need to save the file to disk and also ensure we track a photo_path that can be used to display the image. This is a bit more logic than our automated system will handle, so we’ll need an extra function call to perform these modifications. I’ve added the following method to AbstractPostType :

public function transformData($data) { return $data; }

By default, my AbstractPostType::transformData() is a no-op. And I call it right after I set a default for post_attributes in AbstractPostType::_execute()

$data = $this->transformData($data);

Why can’t I just depend upon the UploadBehavior to do this logic for me? Many behaviors end up changing where things are stored in the Table.beforeSave event, which happens after the Crud.beforeSave event. This means that we’d end up trashing the upload data before the UploadBehavior can handle it. As well, that behavior doesn’t know anything about our weird post_attributes system, so we’d need to handle the logic on our own.

I’ll save my changes for now, and get to add a custom PhotoPostType tomorrow.

git add src/PostType/AbstractPostType.php git commit -m "Allow post types to transform the data before it is further marshalled"

For those that may just want to ensure their codebase matches what has been done so far, the codebase is available on GitHub and tagged as 0.0.13.

A bit of light refactoring is always useful to get your application priorities in order. In this case, it was absolutely necessary in order to figure out where exactly we’d need to hook in for our custom photo type.

Be sure to follow along via twitter on @savant. If you’d like to subscribe to this blog, you may follow the rss feed here. Also, all posts in the series will be conveniently linked on the sidebar of every post in the 2016 CakeAdvent Calendar. Come back tomorrow for more delicious content.