Question

I’m reading the Yii blog tutorial. What does this code do

foreach($models as $model)
    self::$_items[$type][$model->code]=$model->name;

in the loadItems static function. Where does [$model->code] and $model->name come from and what does this line of code do?

Answer 1

The loadItems() is a static function that loads the available statuses for certain “type” that you need, for example, for comments, or for posts. So for example, it prepares the available “status descriptions” for “posts” just before rendering the “post edit page” so you’ll have the needed values in the post status dropdown.

The $model is instantiated inside this static function just before the lines you quoted. It means that while this is indeed static method, which means called without instantiating “Lookup” class, inside of it, it does other things. The Full stop here is to emphasize that a class method is a fully contained unit of code. It can do whatever it needs to do inside. In general, one doesn’t need to care about its internals (unless the person is designing and coding those internals, of course) but my point is that you need to grasp two distinct things here – the first is what this function does when referred to from the outside – and this is simply returning the lookup items for a certain class. The second thing is that internally, while being a static function, it instantiates some class objects, in our case objects of the same type – Lookup.
This instantiation is done using Yii’s Active Record capabilities – the “findAll()” method which will do the needed SQL for you and return the result set of the found records as an array of instantiated objects of type Lookup.

I hope this clears some… .