Question

i’m currently learning the yii framework and have read their documentation.

but i still don’t understand the components. what are these. they talk about component events and behaviors.

could someone explain these terms for me and give me real app examples of what a component, its events and behaviors could be?

would be helpful!

Answer 1

A CComponent by itself doesn’t do much. It’s very much like a QObject in Qt. A CComponent can raise events, and can have delegates to events (through attachEventHandler()).

Regarding behaviours, the manual says:

The methods of the behavior can be
invoked as if they belong to the
component. Multiple behaviors can be
attached to the same component.

To attach a behavior to a component,
call attachBehavior; and to detach the
behavior from the component, call
detachBehavior.

A behavior can be temporarily enabled
or disabled by calling enableBehavior
or disableBehavior, respectively. When
disabled, the behavior methods cannot
be invoked via the component.

Starting from version 1.1.0, a
behavior’s properties (either its
public member variables or its
properties defined via getters and/or
setters) can be accessed through the
component it is attached to.

Which gives you the possibility to simulate a signals and slots mechanism, or the strategy pattern (by enabling or disabling behaviours).

Most of the classes in Yii have CComponent as a base class.

As a user, you’ll see the benefits they provide through the mechanisms mentioned above when you’ll create your own components (under protected/components/).

You can find a good starting point for implementing components here: http://www.yiiframework.com/doc/guide/basics.component