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'

Considering local, dev and live environments

When you develop a website for a client you should usually be considering three or even four (if you also include staging) environments where one code base may be used. Local, development and live.

In this case you may want the code to behave slightly differently depending on where it’s being used.

A good example I regularly come across is when and where to send any emails that a system generates. When you are testing locally or on a development server you certainly don’t want to send out emails to people who have no knowledge of the system.

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Move your Sites folder in OS X with a SymLink NOT an Alias

Two hours of my life were wasted on this one, even though I’ve done it before. So…

If you want to move your ~/Sites folder into say Dropbox or AeroFS or Google Drive or SkyDrive and then you still want to point to it from its default location don’t use an alias.

I know an alias is only a ctrl-click away, but it means all sorts of pain.

Instead, move the folder to dropbox by dragging it (yes you can do this), then open Terminal and type:

ln -s ~/Dropbox/Sites ~/Sites

Replace Dropbox with whatever the folder of your service is called.

Restart Apache either by restarting Web Sharing in System Preference -> Sharing or by using Terminal and typing:

apachectl graceful

Cross your fingers and open a virtual host in your web browser. I fought with an Alias and all sorts of folder settings and httpd.conf lines to try and get it working, and then all I needed was to use a SymLink in its place.

Don’t worry about no longer having a ‘real’ ~/Sites folder. You don’t actually need one.

Cheers to James Galley, my desk neighbour for helping my brain to click on this one.

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 ' );

Yii – “Model.id” not defined for CArrayDataProvider and CSqlDataProvider etc

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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