Question

I have a facebook app developed in plain PHP, I’m migrating the app to YII framework.

The thing is that I use a class call “utilsFacebook” where I have the object facebook(of the fb sdk) and all the methods that I need to get data from facebook, getUserId, getUserFriendList, etc.

I don’t know how to handle all the operations that I do in utilsFacebook with Yii.

Create a controller with the functions of utilsFacebook is the correct think to do?
Every time that I instance the controller would create a new Facebook object, Should I store that object in a SESSION to get a better performance or is a bad idea?

Answer 1

Q. Create a controller with the functions of utilsFacebook is the correct think to do?

Having done a facebook app using yii as the framework, i would recommend you to make this library either a component, or an extension.

But definitely don’t put these functions in the controller directly. Whenever a controller needs them call the functions using your custom facebook util class.

Components can be put in the folder: projectrootfolder/protected/components

Extensions can be put in the folder: projectrootfolder/protected/extensions

If you don’t believe that either of these make semantic sense, you can always create a new folder within protected, say utils and put the class there. However i think extensions is the best way to go.

Q. Should I store that object in a SESSION to get a better performance or is a bad idea?

I don’t think it’s necessary to store the object in a session, because there will be no visible performance gain. Further you’ll complicate your code unnecessarily.

What i had done was, created an app level component and used this component throughout the app, in any controller.

Example:

In your application’s config, protected/config/main.php :

'components'=>array(
    'fbHelper'=>array( // gave the component this name
        'class'=>'ext.utils.FacebookHelper', // had stored the helper class in extensions/utils folder
        'parameter1'='somevalue',
        // more parameters
    ),

    // standard yii app components

),

This will allow you to use the component like this: Yii::app()->fbHelper->getFriends();

Take a look at the facebook-opengraph extension, which could help you, on the way.