Question

I have some experience in Zend framework. Recently I started to using Yii.

Now I’m trying to find some analogy in this frameworks.

In Zend almost every route has an own name. You can create for instance a next route ‘photos_map’:

$router->addRoute('photos_map',
    new Zend_Controller_Router_Route('map/:city', array(
        'controller' => 'photos', 
        'action' => 'map',
        'city' => ''
    ))
);

And using it in view by url helper:

echo $this->url(array(), 'photos_map') // output '/map'

In Zend you can also pass the parameter (in above example it’s city) whether in the initialization or in the url-helper call.

If you want to change urls you can just change param string in the initialization map/:city to whatewer you want. It’s very useful because you don’t need to replace an old-url to a new-url everywhere in your code.

My question is this possible in Yii? I fluently read the documentation and started to thunk that Yii routes are much less powerful. Is this a sacrifice of performance or I missed something?

Answer 1

Routing in Yii is easy and a bit different comparing to Zend. In Yii, a view is rendered using a controller, so to render a view , you will have to call a controller. For eg, you are in the index page of a site and you want to go to preview page.

$url = Yii::app()->createUrl('/site/preview');
//Here site is the name of the controller class and preview is the name of the action
//You will need to have a controller named SiteController in your controllers folder
//You will need to have a folder named "site" in your views folder
//You will need to have an action(function) defined as actionPreview in your controller class

Now in the controller class, (in this case SiteConroller.php),

public function actionPreview()
{
     $this->render('preview',array('data'=>''));
     //will render preview.php located in views/site/preview.php
     //u can pass parameters in array as shown above, in this case data 
}

If you want to change the url, u can simply change the part $this->render(‘your_view_file.php’);
I hope it helps……….Feel free to ask questions……