elements or view extensions or something else? reference app? - cakephp

Question

In cakephp [2.2] I have baked everything and my "people" view is quite busy with relations and phones and addresses and other related data. I do want all of that information visible in the people view, though not quite in the baked layout.
How should I handle those portions of the related data? I'm not sure if I should use elements or extended views or plugins or what, I'm kinda new to this and the documentation wasn't clear to me (at my level) which should be used when. The baked code seemed to be a monolithic approach, so I didn't get much help looking there.
Once the user chooses to edit a phone number (for instance) from the listing on the person view, it takes them to the phone edit view and then returns them to the phone listing (index view) and not the person view that they were on. How do I get them back to the person view instead?
The blog example they provide is nice, but is there a "reference" application somewhere for cakephp that demonstrates best practices on a wide variety of their features? I couldn't find one, or anything more than just a simple app example.
Thanks, I appreciate the guidance.

Answer 1

This is a rather broad question, but I'm going to try and answer it. I'm not sure how advanced you're programming knowledge is, so forgive me if I'm rehashing things you already know. First, this article was a great help when I started to use the framework for the first time as it explains what code should go where and why. It's the closest I've seen to a "reference application", which would actually be a great learning tool. You could try and have a look at some of the higher profile Cake applications, like Croogo (a Cake-based CMS). But the codebase is bound to be a little bit complex.
Personally I would use elements when you want to actually reuse them in different views. The problem however, is feeding the element its data. There's a method called requestAction, but even the manual states that this should be used with moderation and in combination with caching. The problem is that using a lot of requestAction calls in different elements litters your Controllers with methods and doesn't adhere to the "Skinny Controllers, Fat Models" mantra.
I would put most of the related data calls in their respective Models and call those Model methods from the Controller and feed them to the View. So let's say you want the 10 latest PhoneNumbers and related Users.
You would have a method in your PhoneNumber model which returns an array of users and their phonenumbers. Use the Containable behaviour to limit the number of related models which are returned. The code below is an example, so the practical implementation might vary:
public function getRecentPhoneNumbers($limit=10) {
$phoneNumbers = array();
$phoneNumbers = $this->find('all', array(
'limit' => $limit,
'contain' => array('User'),
'order' => 'PhoneNumber.id DESC'
));
return $phoneNumbers;
}
If the PhoneNumber and User model are properly related you would be able to call getRecentPhoneNumbers() from the User model:
$this->PhoneNumber->getRecentPhoneNumbers(10)
Or from the Users Controller:
$this->User->PhoneNumber->getRecentPhoneNumbers(10)
Say you have an element which shows a list of those 10 numbers and it accepts a variable called $recentPhonenumbers, you then set the variable in the relevant UsersController method with the returned array from the getRecentPhoneNumbers call:
$this->set('recentPhonenumbers', $this->User->PhoneNumber->getRecentPhoneNumbers(10));
This will make it available to the View that contains the element.
The extended views are relatively new (from Cake 2.1 and onwards) and I haven't used them, but seem a great way to create conditional markup.
As for the second question, redirecting the user to the person view, rather than the index view. This is a matter of adjusting the redirect (see the manual for more details) in the edit() method of the Controller. Standard baked edit() methods accept an $id parameter you can use this to redirect to the view() (which probably also accepts an $id paramater).
So the redirect probably looks something like this:
$this->redirect(array('controller' => 'users', 'action' => 'index'));
Change it to:
$this->redirect(array('controller' => 'users', 'action' => 'view', $id));