Question

Yes, the only question is whether I’m doing it correct or not. And maybe a fix for it.

I have an application in Yii where I have a simple Admin backend where I can put some predefined settings in it.

The MySQL database table:

I have an Admin Controller:
I am only showing the intended action

class AdminController extends Controller
{

    public function actionIndex()
    {
        // Update a setting
        if (isset($_POST['submit']))
        {
            AdminSetting::updateSetting('topCategory', $_POST['topCategory']);
            AdminSetting::updateSetting('marketRegion', $_POST['marketRegion']);
        }

        // Get all settings
        $topCategory = AdminSetting::model()->find('name = :name', array(':name' => 'topCategory'));
        $marketRegion = AdminSetting::model()->find('name = :name', array(':name' => 'marketRegion'));

        if (isset($marketRegion->value))
            $marketRegion = $marketRegion->value;
        if (isset($topCategory->value))
            $topCategory = $topCategory->value;

        $this->render('index', array('topCategory' => $topCategory, 'marketRegion' => $marketRegion));
    }
}

The model AdminSetting.php:
I am only showing the added function: updateSetting

class AdminSetting extends CActiveRecord
{

    public static function updateSetting($name, $value)
    {
        Yii::app()->db->createCommand("UPDATE admin_setting SET value = '$value' WHERE name = '$name'")->execute();
    }
}

The User Interface:

I have it done this way, because I have one page, with multiple records showing data. That is not the way it default works in Yii. Whereever I search I see only that other programmers are editing one record at a time.

A second question arise:
How to save multiple records to the database at a time with the default functionality of the ActiveRecordModel.

I see that if I continue this way, I have a growing list in my actionIndex that saves every field by hand.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Answer 1

The best approach here would be to code an entirely new model deriving from CActiveForm. To go with this, you will have to override the form model’s __get and __set methods to grab a list of all your configuration settings (let’s say from a hardcoded array, since the actual database entries may end up missing for whatever reason) and behave like all of them exist as properties on the model.

After you have done this you are now ready to reap massive benefits:

You can work as if your configuration settings are properties of the form model

• There’s no longer any need to pass each one around as its own variable; just pass $model to the view and access the settings like $model->settingName (your __get override will need to make sure this works)

• You can now massively set all your configuration options as attributes:

  $model = new MyAdminFormModel;
  $model->attributes = $_POST['MyAdminFormModel'];
  

You can easily render the whole form as a series of fields in one go

Do this by creating a new CForm and dynamically populating its elements property (MyAdminFormModel should have all the necessary information to do this). You can then render the form easily with something like

foreach($form->getElements() as $element) {
    echo $element->render();
}

Of course all of this is going to require a non-trivial amount of code, but when you set it up you will be able to just add a row to an array (where MyAdminFormModel gets its data from) and then everything else will automagically work.