Question

If you look under #3 in this link http://www.yiiframework.com/doc/guide/1.1/en/basics.controller it gives you a way to organize all of your controller functions into individual php files.

To do this you have to have each php file contain a class that extends CAction. Each class must have its running code inside of the function run().

This is my UserController.php file

public function actions()
{
    $FOLDER = '.User';
    $PROJECT_ROOT = 'application.controllers' . $FOLDER;

    return array (
        'list' => $PROJECT_ROOT . 'ListAction',
);

}

In the application that I am writing I need to pass variables to specific Actions.

Yii implemented runWithParams($params) in Yii 1.7 to allow this to happen. However, when I call write in the (for example) DeleteAction.php file runWithParams($params) instead of run() and our front end calls post/delete/?params=45 instead of run() I get an error that says “could not find run() in file DeleteAction.php

class ListAction extends CAction
{
public function runWithParam($id)
{
    SiteController::actionLoggedin();
    $id = addslashes($id);
}

Which means that I need run()…but I can’t pass parameters into run(). I need runWithParams($params).

In the documentation for the function runWithParams($params)
http://www.yiiframework.com/doc/api/1.1/CAction#runWithParams-detail

it says

    Runs the action with the supplied request parameters. This method is internally called by CController::runAction().

I am confused what this means? I don’t understand how I can implement this successfully.

Answer 1

You just need to implement run() in a CAction class.

You will automatically have access to the $_GET params, of course, like you would in your action normally:

class ListAction extends CAction {
  public function run() {
    $id = $_GET['id']; // $_POST works too
    $model = Model::model()->findbyPk($id);
    // render your view next, whatever
  }
}

If you want to pass in additional constants to the CAction from the Controller, you can do it like this:

In your action setup in your Controller:

public function actions() {
  return array(
    'userSearch'=>array(
      'class'=>'application.controllers.User.ListAction', // path alias to your action
      'model'=>'User',
      'otherVariable'=>'something here',
  ));
}

Then in your CAction:

class ListAction extends CAction {
  public $modelName;
  public $otherVariable;
  public function run() {
    $this->modelName; //  'User' - passed in from the calling Controller
    $this->otherVariable; //  'something here' - passed in from the calling Controller
  }
}

I’m not sure what other parameters you might want to pass in to your action, but that should cover it. I hope that helps!

Update:

This question has made me look at the code in more depth, and this is actually all to do with a feature of Yii which I did not know about. If you declare a parameter on your action (i.e. function actionTest($param)), then Yii will parse the $_GET parameters of a request and call the Action with that parameter passed in to the function. So you don’t have to get the $_GET parameter yourself. Like so:

http://example.com/mycontroller/myaction?param1=test

function actionMyaction($param1) { // in a CAction, it would be run($param1)
  echo '$_GET parameter param1 set to '.$param1; // will echo "test"
}

The way this is implemented is:

1. In runAction() CController gets the $_GET parameters (if there are any) with getActionParams()
2. runAction() passes these parameters into runWithParams()
3. runWithParams() uses PHP Reflection to see if the action method has parameters (e.g. $param1)
   1. If there are parameters, it calls runWithParamsInternal() with the $_GET parameters
      1. runWithParamsInternal() calls the run() method with the $_GET parameters (e.g. run($param1))
   2. Otherwise it just calls run() without any parameters

It’s totally optional to use this, you can still access the $_GET parameters like normal in your action without. Basically, this just enforces required $_GET parameters. If your action needs a parameter but there are not $_GET parameters in the request URL, Yii returns an “Error 400” from invalidActionParams(). It saves you the burden of checking isset($_GET) in your action, which is kind of cool.