Yii upgrade service

Yii 1.1 is currently in maintenance mode following Yii 2 being released way back in May 2013.

Support and bug fixes for Yii 1 were only provided until December 31, 2016 and security fixes and PHP 7 compatibility ends December 31, 2020.

That means that right now the only reason updates to Yii 1 are being created and made available are for security issues found in the existing codebase, and from 2021 it’s mothballed completely.

If you’re maintaining a Yii 1 codebase it’s time to start thinking about how to migrate away from Yii completely, or upgrade your codebase to Yii 2.

There is an official guide aimed at supporting the upgrade process, but it is unlikely to get you from Yii 1 to Yii 2 without significant pain and head scratching.

Converting from Yii 1 to Yii 2 is completely unlike developing code for either framework, and you’d want to source a Yii upgrade professional rather than getting an inexperienced developer or team involved with a large or mission critical codebase.

Personally I’ve now upgraded four codebases from Yii 1 to Yii 2. All the upgrades have been different. All follow a similar path, and the repeatable process I’ve created, but each has its own edge cases, bespoke widgets and complexities.

The work takes many days per codebase before testing and perfection can happen, and where an existing development team are involved with ongoing development or support of the Yii 1 system, it’s best handled as a team effort. Acceptance that the process isn’t anywhere close to just flicking a switch or downloading a patch is required from day one.

At this point I’m considering two next steps.

Firstly, if your company has significant budget and is in need of support moving from Yii 1 to Yii 2, I’d be interested in hearing from you. You may want a supportive voice helping your existing developers to make the move. You may also be looking to hand over a Yii 1 codebase and get it back ready for some testing and iteration.

Secondly, I’m considering sharing some or all of the process I’ve created for manually moving a codebase over from Yii 1 to Yii 2, the gotchas, the process and how to update specific things within Yii 1, where it isn’t as simple as a like

Feel free to send me a direct message on Twitter @harrybailey or leave a comment below if you’d like to contact me.

Yii 1, PHP 7.1, yii-pdf and Mpdf

Mpdf 6.x only supports PHP versions up to 7.0. If you’re upgrading your local machine, or hosting environment to PHP 7.1 or beyond (you should be) then you’ll need to upgrade your Mpdf install to something more recent than 6. That requires a few changes.

Now just to make things complex here, the latest version of Mpdf happens to be version 7.1. From here on I’ll try and prefix any version numbers with either PHP or Mpdf.

Mpdf 7 and greater is composer install only. You could still download and copy the files into place, but I highly recommend using composer to manage your vendor packages in Yii (and Yii 2). It will save you hours and hours over time.

Mpdf 7 has updated it’s class name to be Mpdf with a capital M, and changed it’s construct method to accept a config array instead of separate parameters. Small but significant updates we’ll have to deal with.

If you’re already using composer, then you’ll have a composer.json file in the root of your codebase, and in there you should have a line which starts “mpdf/mpdf”.

That line will probably end something like “^6.0” or “^6.4”

Assuming it’s less than “7.x.x” we’re going to update with composer.

Back up your codebase. I shouldn’t have to mention it, but do it, honest.

Run composer require mpdf/mpdf “^7.0”

That line will install the latest version, Mpdf 7.1, allow anything newer to be installed if you update in the future, and change your composer.json file (and likely your composer.lock file too) to include the newer information.

So we have the latest code, but we need to update Yii to use it.

yii-pdf wraps mpdf and makes it available via Yii->app()->ePdf->mpdf()

The yii-pdf config to get it functioning with Mpdf 7+ will look something like this:

'ePdf' => [
	'class' => 'application.extensions.yii-pdf.EYiiPdf',
	'params' => [
		'mpdf' => [
			'librarySourcePath' => 'vendor.mpdf.mpdf.src.*',
			'constants' => [
				'_MPDF_TEMP_PATH' => Yii::getPathOfAlias('application.runtime'),
			],
			'class'=>'\Mpdf\Mpdf',
			'defaultParams' => [
				'mode' => '',		//  This parameter specifies the mode of the new document.
				'format' => 'A4',	// format A4, A5, ...
			],
		],
	],
],

Note the librarySourcePath and class values. You can add your existing defaultParams and anything else which was in your preferences previously.

The last part is to update all places where you call the mpdf library. Previously it would have looks something like:

$mpdf = Yii::app()->ePdf->mpdf('UTF-8', '', 0, '', 15, 15, 15, 15, 8, 8);

We now convert the config to be an array of values:

$mpdf = Yii::app()->ePdf->mpdf(['UTF-8', '', 0, '', 15, 15, 15, 15, 8, 8]);

And that should be it. Update using composer, update your config, update all locations you instantiate mpdf. Then check your pdf generating code is still functioning.

Yii (and Yii2) wildcard / catch all url rules

Both Yii and Yii2 have url management and routing built in. They will compare the url of the request to a list of rules you’ve defined.

Sometimes you might want to do various checks of the url in yii config main and then send every other request to a particular controller.

The rule you need to add last to the urlManager is…

'(.*)' => 'controller/action',

… and now any rule that isn’t matched previously will end up being sent to your defined controller and action.

In Yii2 you can also do the same:

'<url:(.*)>' => 'controller/action'

Reordering Yii Results Without Another Select

In case you weren’t aware, you can reorder the results you already have from a previous Yii call. For example…


$users = User::model()->findByPk(2);
$posts = $user->posts(array('order'=>' created Desc '));

There were just ordered our users posts by created date descending.

We can also do filtering…


$users = User::model()->findByPk(2);
$posts = $user->posts(array('condition'=>' status=1 '));

So now we only have active posts. We could also combine a condition and a status.

You can find out more here: http://www.yiiframework.com/doc/guide/1.1/en/database.arr#dynamic-relational-query-options

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Yii 2 (and Yii 1.1) UpdateAll Examples

A few Yii 2 updateAll examples:

Updating a single column:

$rows = Comment::updateAll(['status' => 1], 'type_id = 1 AND status = 0');

Updating multiple columns:

$rows = Comment::updateAll(['status' => 1, 'updated' => '2011-08-25 09:33:23'], 'type_id = 1 AND status = 0' );

Some simple Yii 1.1 examples of how to use updateAll():

In this example we want to set status = 1 WHERE type_id = 1 AND status = 0

Note this is a simple example where we are only updating one column and using a string for our condition. There are more complex options available.

$rows = Comment::model()->updateAll(array( 'status' => 1 ), 'type_id = 1 AND status = 0' );

So as you can see first comes an array of column => new_value pairs, then a condition string which is pretty much used as the WHERE clause.

An example of updating more than one column:

$rows = Comment::model()->updateAll(array( 'status' => 1, 'updated' => '2011-08-25 09:33:23' ), 'type_id = 1 AND status = 0 ' );