There is cool JavaScript trick that helps you catch broken images. You know that when the image doesn’t exist, the http path to the image returns 404 or the path is wrong, the browser doesn’t display nothing in the most cases. As MSIE is always different it displays an ugly icon saying that there is not an image to load
and that is really bad!
Simply add an onerror handler on the IMG tag
<img src="http://..../broken_url.jpg" onerror="this.src='path_to_default_image'" /> |
There is an easy way to send requests with Zend_Http_Client either in GET and POST. Actually you can request not only with GET and POST methods, but with any other http request method.
$httpClient = new Zend_Http_Client('http://....'); // request via post $response = $httpClient->request(Zend_Http_Client::POST); // or get $response = $httpClient->request(Zend_Http_Client::GET); |
However the interesting and useful thing is that you can perform authenticated requests:
$httpClient = new Zend_Http_Client('http://username:password@example.com'); // or define it later $httpClient = new Zend_Http_Client('http://example.com'); $httpClient->setAuth('username', 'password'); |
That’s an opportunity to send/receive authenticated POST requests.
$httpClient = new Zend_Http_Client('http://username:password@example.com'); // now post $httpClient->request(Zend_Http_Client::POST); |
Typically Zend Framework is setup to bind every controller’s action to a specific view. The names of the action and the view script must be the same, or at least must be similar – following the ZF’s convention.
Thus if you name an action, let’s say, indexAction(), you’ve to create an index.phtml file into the views/scripts/index/ folder. Let me remind you that this is what is called a typical setup, but this may vary from one installation to another.
Thus everything’s fine and the MVC does its best. After the user requests a specific uri, the framework parses it and finds the controller, than the action and than the view script – and there is a view script for every single action.
When there are two or more actions – there are two or more .phtml (view scripts) files.
Sometimes you have very similar logic, but very different markup between two actions. As the logic goes to the controller/action and the markup into the view, the question is can you simply have one action in the controller, but with two different .phtml file as a view scripts? Of course switching between those two (or more) with some conditionals.
However once I posted a simple, and working, solution. There you have again two actions and two scripts:
<?php class IndexController extends Zend_Controller_Action { public function firstAction() { // place all the logic you need here // and every view placeholder assignment $this->view->title = "My Title"; // if the logic requires a different markup // simply redirect to another view if (some_expression) { $this->_forward('second'); } } public function secondAction() {} } // in the application/views/scripts/index // 1. first.phtml <h1><?php echo $this->title ?></h1> // 2. second.phtml <h2><?php echo $this->title ?></h2> |
As you can see in the second action there’s no logic – it’s only serving the role of a bridge between the views. Everything is setup into the first action, but the second action is doing the relation with the second.phtml view script.
However there’s another solution with only one action and two scripts which makes something like that shown on the diagram bellow:
The only thing to do is to add some code to your action:
<?php class IndexController extends Zend_Controller_Action { public function firstAction() { // place all the logic you need here // and every view placeholder assignment $this->view->title = "My Title"; // if the logic requires a different markup // simply redirect to another view if (some_expression) { echo $this->view->render('index/second.phtml'); $this->_helper->viewRenderer->setNoRender(true); } } } // in the application/views/scripts/index // 1. first.phtml <h1><?php echo $this->title ?></h1> // 2. second.phtml <h2><?php echo $this->title ?></h2> |
Note that you’ve to setNoRender on the view renderer once you render the other script!
Once I wrote about redirecting with Zend Framework, but what I missed back than was a common mistake. Although the code from my post is working, to be completely correct after redirecting I’d to add an exit() statement.
This is important because the header is changed and if something goes after the redirect there will be some problems. Finally the correct snippet is:
public function() { $this->_redirect('some_url'); exit(); } |
As you may know in PHP you can access everything in the request uri by accessing the global $_GET array. If there is something like that in the browser’s address field: www.example.com/index.php?controller=index&action=test, you can simply get the values by that:
echo $_GET['controller']; // this will print "index" echo $_GET['action']; // this will print "test" |
If you code with Zend Framework, you should know already, and that’s perhaps the first thing you’ve learned about Zend, that $_GET params can be accessed by calling the requrest’s getParam() method. But first of all the request uri will be different. The Zend’s convetion is to place after the domain name first the module name (which is omited when there’s only one module), than the controller’s name followed by the action and the key value pairs of all parameters. In that scheme the request uri above will look like that:
http://www.example.com/index/test |
Here the keywords “controller” and “action” are omitted. This is cool – it’s more user friendly and it definitely helps the SEO.
Once the uri is setup like so – /index/test you can access it via the Zend way:
echo $this->getRequest()->getParam('controller'); // this will print "index" |
The cool thing is that in the first case you don’t have any prevention of a missing value, while in the second case there is a second parameter or the getParam() method that does this job. What if the uri is www.example.com/index.php?controller=&action=test than by printing the $_GET[‘controller’] you’ll get nothing. In other hand even this:
echo $this->getRequest()->getParam('action'); |
won’t return “test” if the uri is http://www.example.com/index/
Note: actually here the default “index” action will be referenced!
That’s where the power of the framework comes. In the first case the solution is:
echo (empty($_GET['controller']) ? 'default': $_GET['controller']); |
while in Zend there’s more elegant solution:
echo $this->getRequest()->getParam('action', 'test'); |
Thus when the action param is missing the “test” value is considered as default! Very useful!