There is a Yii error I come across every now and again, and each time it stumps me.

If you ever get SomeModel.id not defined error when trying to put your dataprovider results into a cgridview or similar then it’s likely because

1) Your model doesn’t have an id column, it might use file_id or user_id etc instead and

2) You haven’t defined which other column should be used.

We do this using what’s known as keyField:

new CArrayDataProvider($users, array('keyField' => 'user_id'));
new CSqlDataProvider($users, array('keyField' => 'user_id'));

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I recently had a need to track files and images which were uploaded and for their urls to be secret. This meant that they couldn’t sit in a folder waiting to be found and had to be saved below the site root.

To get access to them I wanted to the check the user permissions followed by forcing download of all files (including images). Here are the steps I took to accomplish this…

For the sake of this page, my (fake) file urls are something like:

example.com/user/123/file/456.pdf

Update the urlmanager to rewrite files to my filemanager/view:

	'user//file/.[a-z0-9]+' => 'filemanager/view',

Update the filemanager class’ actionView function:

	public function actionView($id)
	{
		$file = $this->loadModel($id);

		header("Pragma: public"); // required
		header("Expires: 0");
		header("Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0");
		header("Cache-Control: private",false); // required for certain browsers 
		//header("Content-Type: " . $file->mime_type);
		header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"" . str_replace(" ", "-", preg_replace("@[^a-z0-9 ]@", "", strtolower($file->file_name))) . '.' . $file->file_extension . "\";" );
		header("Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary");
		header("Content-Length: ".filesize(Yii::app()->basePath . '/../../uploads/user_files/' . $file->file_id . '.' . $file->file_extension));
		readfile(Yii::app()->basePath . '/../../uploads/user_files/' . $file->file_id . '.' . $file->file_extension);
		exit();

	}

I also of course required filemanager access to be strict:

	public function accessRules()
	{
		return array(
			array('allow', 
				'actions'=>array('view', 'create','delete'),
				'users'=>array(),
				'expression' => 'User::model()->hasRightsToFile()',
			),
			array('deny',  // deny all users
				'users'=>array('*'),
			),
		);
	}

And that’s about it. Controlled and forced file download with rewritten file urls.

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Sometimes you want to show a filter dropdown but by default it will show all value options even if not assigned to anything. You can use findAll with criteria to only bring back items which are in use…

$criteria = new CDbCriteria;
$criteria->join = 'INNER JOIN organisation ON organisation.category_id = t.category_id';

if($_GET['school_id'])
{
	$criteria->condition = 'organisation.school_id = ' . $_GET['school_id'];
}
else
{

}

$categories = OrganisationCategory::model()->findAll($criteria);
$categories_array = array();
foreach($categories as $category)
{
	$categories_array[$category->category_id] = $category->name;
}


$columns = array(
	'name',
	array(
		'name'=>'category_id',
		'value' => 'OrganisationCategory::model()->findByPk($data->category_id)->name',
		'filter' => $categories_array
[...]

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