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Name: klenwell

Home: San Diego, California, United States

About Me: designer, programmer, wordsmith

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Friday, October 17, 2008

Creating Custom Behaviors in CakePHP

The CakePHP manual leaves a lot to be desired on this topic. Here's one important tip that I couldn't find mentioned on the site:

Every method in your behavior class must have a reference to the model passed as its first argument.

Another tip:

If calling another method from within your behavior class, you must include the model reference as your first argument.

I've added a gratuitous example to the test method below.

A simple behavior class that can be used as a template:

<?php

class NormalizerBehavior extends ModelBehavior {

public $name = 'Normalizer';

/*
Initiate behaviour for the model using specified settings.
*/
function setup(&$Model, $settings = array())
{
}

/*
Run before a model is saved.
*/
function beforeSave(&$Model)
{
}

function normalize_date(&$Model, $date_str)
{
return date('Y-m-d', strtotime(trim($date_str)));
}

function test(&$Model)
{
$date = $this->normalize_date($Model, date('Y-m-d'));
printf('testing behavior %s for model %s on %s', __CLASS__, $Model->name, $date);
}
}

?>

If I discover any other noteworthy tips, I'll add them here.

Labels: cakephp