Question

In these days I thought on how to work better with AppHelpers in CakePHP. I thought to use the AppHelper to make links and other html elements consistent depending by the context i need, for example, for users I have the method

$this->AppUser->profile($data, $options, $attributes);

this method returns a link styled for the users, with a specific css classes, maybe something line this:

<a class="user female" href="http://url/profiles/username">Username</a>

My problem is the data is structured differently by the situation, in some case I have an array like this:

$data['User']['id']
$data['User']['username']
$data['Profile']['user_id']
$data['Profile']['sex']
$data['Profile']['other']

And in some other cases, with different queries and different entities I have this:

$data['User']['id']
$data['User']['username']
$data['User']['Profile']['user_id']
$data['User']['Profile']['sex']
$data['User']['Profile']['other']

So I would like to understand if I missing something in the data hierarchy because it should be always structured in the same way?

And so should I to send data to the Helper always structured in the same way?

Should I let the helper parse the data depending by the situation, so with conditions to find where the data is?

Answer 1

That’s pretty common, and is a result of finding related items multiple levels deep. I usually have a helper method on the Helper that normalizes the data.

I would always send the data to the helper as-is, and then restructure it as needed within the helper. It would look something like this:

function normalizeUserData($data) {
  foreach ($data['User'] as $field => $value) {
    if (is_array($value)) {
      // move it to the same level as User
      $data[$field] = $value;
      unset($data['User'][$field]);
    }
  }
}

Now your functions can always expect the Profile data on the same level as the User key. This function isn’t perfect and isn’t recursive, but should give you a good start.