Agile Web Application Development with Yii1.1 and PHP5

368 Pages·2010·3.644 MB·English

by  Jeffrey Winesett

Agile Web Application
Development with Yii 1.1
and PHP5
Fast-track your web application development by
harnessing the power of the Yii PHP Framework
Jeffery Winesett
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Agile Web Application Development with Yii 1.1
and PHP5
Copyright © 2010 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
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However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: August 2010
Production Reference: 1030810
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
32 Lincoln Road
Olton
Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-847199-58-4
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Vinayak Chittar ([email protected])
Credits
Author Editorial Team Leader
Jeffery Winesett Aanchal Kumar
Reviewers Project Team Leader
Imre Mehesz Priya Mukherji
Jonah Turnquist
Kyle Ferreira Project Coordinator
Prasad Rai
Acquisition Editor
Usha Iyer Proofreader
Lesley Harrison
Development Editors
Dhwani Devater Graphics
Geetanjali Sawant
Reshma Sundaresan
Production Coordinator
Technical Editors
Melwyn D'sa
Aditya Belpathak
Hyacintha D'Souza
Cover Work
Melwyn D'sa
Indexer
Hemangini Bari
About the Author
Jeffery Winesett is the director of software engineering and application
development at Control Group Inc., a New York based consulting firm specializing
in delivering technology for big ideas. He has spent the last five of his twelve years
of software development focused on delivering large-scale PHP-based applications.
Jeffery also writes articles on the topics of PHP, web application frameworks, and
software development. He has enjoyed being a Yii evangelist since its early
alpha version.
I'd like to thank all of the technical reviewers, editors, and
staff at Packt for their fantastic contributions, suggestions, and
improvements. I'd like to thank Qiang Xue and the entire Yii
Framework developer team for creating and maintaining this
brilliant framework. Ryan Trammel at Scissortail design for his
attention to detail and CSS assistance. My lovely wife Tiffany, for
her endless patience throughout this project and Lemmy and Lucie
for providing me with an endless supply of sunshine.
About the Reviewers
Imre Mehesz is a long-time open source and PHP enthusiast. He started with
the classic LAMP stack around 2000 and grew into the MVC world with CakePHP,
ZendFramework, and now Yii. He brought Yii into his professional life and runs
the Yii Radio podcast.
I would like to thank Qiang for creating this framework, and my
wife who puts up with my craziness for open source development.
Jonah Turnquist is a self-taught web developer and a college student. He is a
part of the developer team for the Yii Framework, mainly contributing to the official
extension library, Zii. Meanwhile, he is attending a junior college in California, and
he is on his way to being transferred to a four year degree in college in the Fall of
2010. He is studying Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.
Kyle Ferreira is a student at the University of Ontario, Institute of Technology
taking a four year degree in IT (BIT) under Network Security. As a student, he has
spent a lot of time researching IT security-related topics, and has valued experience
working with various computer languages and equipment. He's currently running
his own business in web design and development, using the Yii Framework as the
basis for a lot of large projects.
I would like to thank Packt Publishing and its staff for this
opportunity to contribute to this production. I'd also like to thank
Qiang Xue for his exceptional devotion to a well designed and
functioning framework, and for his guidance in helping me learn
and contribute to the framework.

Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1: Meet Yii 7
Yii is easy 8
Yii is efficient 8
Yii is extensible 9
MVC architecture 9
The model 10
The view 10
The controller 10
Stitching these together: Yii request routing 11
Blog posting example 11
Object-relational mapping and Active Record 13
Active Record 14
The view and controller 14
Summary 15
Chapter 2: Getting Started 17
Installing Yii 17
Installing a database 19
Creating a new application 19
Hello, World! 22
Creating the controller 22
One final step 26
Reviewing our request routing 27
Adding dynamic content 28
Adding the date and time 28
Adding the date and time, a better approach 29
Moving the data creation to the controller 29
Have you been paying attention? 30
Table of Contents
Linking pages together 31
Linking to a new page 31
Getting a little help from Yii CHtml 32
Summary 34
Chapter 3: The TrackStar Application 35
Introducing TrackStar 35
Creating user stories 36
Users 36
Projects 36
Issues 37
Navigation and page flow 38
Defining a data scheme 39
Defining our development methodology 41
Automated software testing 41
Unit and functional testing 41
Benefits of testing 42
Test-driven development 43
Testing in Yii 43
Unit tests 44
Installing PHPUnit 45
Functional tests 45
Installing Selenium 45
Running a quick example 46
Hello TDD! 47
Summary 52
Chapter 4: Iteration 1: Creating the Initial TrackStar Application 53
Iteration planning 53
Creating the new application 54
Connecting to the database 55
Testing the connection 55
Yii and databases 57
Adding a db connection as an application component 58
Summary 60
Chapter 5: Iteration 2: Project CRUD 61
Iteration planning 61
Running our test suite 62
Creating the project table 62
Naming conventions 63
Creating the AR model class 64
Configuring Gii 65
Using Gii to create our Project AR class 66
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Table of Contents
Testing out our newly generated code 68
Creating the unit test file 69
Testing create 69
Testing read 71
Testing update and delete 72
Was all that testing really necessary? 73
Enabling CRUD operations for users 73
Creating CRUD scaffolding for projects 74
Creating a new project 77
Adding a required field to our form 78
Reading the project 82
Updating and deleting projects 83
Managing projects in admin mode 83
More on testing—fixtures 85
Configuring the fixture manager 86
Creating a fixture 86
Configuring this fixture for use 88 m>
o
Specifying a test database 89 ok.c
o
Using fixtures 90 eb
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Summary 92 wo
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Chapter 6: Iteration 3: Adding Tasks 93 w
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Iteration planning 93 ook
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Running the test suite 94 w!
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Designing the schema 95 m
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Defining some relationships 95 d fr
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Building the database and the relationships 96 nlo
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Creating the Active Record model classes 98 D
Creating the Issue model class 98
Creating the User model class 101
Creating the Issue CRUD operations 101
Using the Issue CRUD operations 102
Creating a new Issue 103
Adding the types drop-down menu 104
Getting the test in the "Red" 105
Moving From "Red" To "Green" 105
Moving Back To "Red" 106
Getting back to "Green" once again 107
Adding the issue type dropdown 107
Adding the status drop-down menu: Do it yourself 111
Fixing the owner and requester fields 112
Enforcing a project context 112
Implementing a filter 113
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