In this tutorial, we will see how to use the CWebUser class to load the user details into the user’s web session.

Customising the CWebUser class

Once the user has been validated, in our case, against the database, we can then load the user details into the webuser class which Yii  holds in the User Session.  Because of this, you should be careful of what information you load and store in the webuser class as it could easily be accessible by the end user.

So we will create a new component called WebUser in protected/components as follows:-

class WebUser extends CWebUser {
 
    // Store model to not repeat query.
    private $_model;
 
    // Return first name.
    // access it by Yii::app()->user->first_name
    function getFirstName(){
        $user = $this->loadUser(Yii::app()->user->id);
        return $user->firstname;
    }
    function getFullName(){
        $user = $this->loadUser(Yii::app()->user->id);
        return $user->fullName();
    }
    function getRole(){
        $user = $this->loadUser(Yii::app()->user->id);
        return $user->role;
    }
    function getPage(){
        $user = $this->loadUser(Yii::app()->user->id);
        return $user->pagination;
    }
    function getPasswordExpires(){
        $user = $this->loadUser(Yii::app()->user->id);
        return $user->checkExpiryDate();        
    }
 
    // This is a function that checks the field 'role'
    // in the User model to be equal to constant defined in our User class
    // that means it's admin
    // access it by Yii::app()->user->isAdmin()
    function isAdmin(){
        $user = $this->loadUser(Yii::app()->user->id);
        if ($user!==null)
            return intval($user->role) == Users::ROLE_ADMIN;
        else return false;
    }
 
    // Load user model.
    protected function loadUser($id=null) {
        if($this->_model===null)
        {
            if($id!==null)
            $this->_model=Users::model()->findByPk($id);
        }
 
        return $this->_model;
    }        
 
}
 

And then in the main configuration file (config/main.php) you will need to specify the class in the User component, for example:

'user'=>array(
 // enable cookie-based authentication
 'allowAutoLogin'=>true,
                        'loginUrl' => array('/site/login'),
                        'class'=>'WebUser',
                ),

Our WebUser class extends the CWebUser class which is the class accessed by the Yii Application User component.  Thus, when you reference Yii::app()->user it will now reference our new WebUser class.  Therefore, anything that we define here can be accessed using the syntax Yii::app()->user->property or Yii::app()->user->function()

Eg: Yii::app()->user->isAdmin()

Other things to note;

1)  Business rules, like the concatenation of the fullName should be held in the User Model, as I have done here, and then can be exposed by the webuser class as a property Yii::app()->user->fullName

2)  I’ve introduced a User Profile field called ‘pagination’ which I use to allow users to define how many items are displayed in a GridView.  For performance reasons, I then set a ceiling that is appropriate for my application in the validation of the User Model.

3) I have updated Part 1 of the Tutorial to include a new function in the User model called checkExpiryDate, so you will need to go back and get that code.

That should now all work, so you can now check Yii:app()->user->isAdmin() to check for authorised users.

In Part 3 (coming soon), I  will then add the functionality to manage the user profile, enable the user to change their passwords and check for password expiration on user login ….

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There are a number of Extensions, Modules and RBAC systems available in the Yii extensions directory and, of course, the built-in Yii RBAC scheme.

But I’ve found that for the medium sized system, all of these are often too complicated and difficult to integrate.

What we are going to build

Autogenerated Yii applications have a very basic User Authentication system that is easily extended to provide a database enabled user authentication and in this series of articles we will be starting from this base.

We will build a simple level based User security system where a user role might be along the lines of subscriber, author, moderator or administrator and we will be able to use these levels to limit access to functions within our applications.

User Passwords will be checked against a strength algorithm.

Users will be forced to change their passwords after a set time interval.

Understanding the difference between WebUser and Authentication

This first part will be to understand the difference between User Authentication and the users Web Identity.

User information is stored in an instance of the CWebUser class and this is created on application initialisation (ie: when the User first connects with the website), irrespective of whether the user is logged in or not. By default, the user is set to “

Guest”.

Authentication is managed by a class called CUserIdentity and this class checks that the user is known and a valid user. How this validation occurs will depend on your application, perhaps against a database, or login with facebook, or against an ldap server etc…

The code generated by Gii defines the login action and loginForm model which manages this process for us and ties these two classes together.

On login, the System creates a UserIdentity class, passing the login details. These are validated against, in this example, a database. The login model then passes the UserIdentity object to the CWebUser object, which then stores this information.

By default the CWebUser class stores its information in session data and therefore, should NOT contain any sensitive information, like passwords.

Our User Model

So our first step is to define our User model and then generate a model and CRUD actions using Gii.

Here is my User table:

CREATE TABLE `users` (
  `id` INT(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `username` VARCHAR(128) NOT NULL,
  `password` VARCHAR(128) NOT NULL,
  `email` VARCHAR(128) NOT NULL,
  `firstname` VARCHAR(128) DEFAULT NULL,
  `lastname` VARCHAR(128) DEFAULT NULL,
  `pagination` tinyint(3) NOT NULL DEFAULT '25',
  `role` INT(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  `create_date` datetime NOT NULL,
  `last_login_time` datetime NOT NULL,
  `status` INT(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  `password_expiry_date` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
  UNIQUE KEY `username` (`username`),
  UNIQUE KEY `email` (`email`),
  KEY `status` (`status`),
  KEY `superuser` (`role`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=1 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8

Now use Gii to generate model and CRUD forms…

Customising the User Model

now we need to update the User model as follows;

1.  Include constants to represent our ROLES

2.  Add fields and validation for repeat passwords, so that on our forms we can ask the user to enter their passwords twice

3.  Password strength algorithm

4.  Combine Firstname and Lastname into FullName

5.  Use beforeSave to check passwords and update password expiry date

6.  Add any relevant relations for your application

 
/**
 * This is the model class for table "users".
 *
 * The followings are the available columns in table 'users':
 * @property integer $id
 * @property string $username
 * @property string $password
 * @property string $email
 * @property string $pagination
 * @property integer $createtime
 * @property integer $last_login_time
 * @property integer $role
 * @property integer $status
 *
 * The followings are the available model relations:
 * @property Customer[] $customers
 * @property Issues[] $issues
 * @property Issues[] $issues1
 */
class Users extends CActiveRecord
{
 const ROLE_AUTHOR=1;
 const ROLE_MODERATOR=3;
 const ROLE_ADMIN=5;
 
 public $passwordSave;
 public $repeatPassword;
 /**
  * Returns the static model of the specified AR class.
  * @param string $className active record class name.
  * @return Users the static model class
  */
 public static function model($className=__CLASS__)
 {
 return parent::model($className);
 }
 
 /**
  * @return string the associated database table name
  */
 public function tableName()
 {
 return 'users';
 }
 
 public function fullName() {
            $fullName=(!empty($this->firstname))? $this->firstname : '';
            $fullName.=(!empty($this->lastname))?( (!empty($fullName))? " ".$this->lastname : $this->lastname ) : '';
            return $fullName;
        }
 /**
  * @return array validation rules for model attributes.
  */
 public function rules()
 {
 // NOTE: you should only define rules for those attributes that
 // will receive user inputs.
 return array(
 array('passwordSave, repeatPassword', 'required', 'on'=>'insert'),
 array('passwordSave, repeatPassword', 'length', 'min'=>6, 'max'=>40),
 array('passwordSave','checkStrength','score'=>20),
 array('passwordSave', 'compare', 'compareAttribute'=>'repeatPassword'),
 
 array('username, password, email', 'required'),
 array('role, status, pagination', 'numerical', 'integerOnly'=>true),
 array('username, firstname, lastname', 'length', 'max'=>128),
 
 array('password, email', 'length', 'max'=>128),
 array('last_login_time, create_date', 'safe'),
 // The following rule is used by search().
 // Please remove those attributes that should not be searched.
 array('id, username, password, email, pagination, createtime, last_login_time, role, status', 'safe', 'on'=>'search'),
 );
 }
 function CheckStrength($attribute,$params) 
 {
 $password=$this->$attribute;
 if ( strlen( $password ) == 0 )
     $strength=-10;
 else
     $strength = 0;
 
 /*** get the length of the password ***/
 $length = strlen($password);
 
 /*** check if password is not all lower case ***/
 if(strtolower($password) != $password)
 {
     $strength += 1;
 }
 
 /*** check if password is not all upper case ***/
 if(strtoupper($password) == $password)
 {
     $strength += 1;
 }
 
 /*** check string length is 8 -15 chars ***/
 if($length >= 8 && $length <= 15)
 {
     $strength += 2;
 }
 
 /*** check if lenth is 16 - 35 chars ***/
 if($length >= 16 && $length <=35)
 {
     $strength += 2;
 }
 
 /*** check if length greater than 35 chars ***/
 if($length > 35)
 {
     $strength += 3;
 }
 
 /*** get the numbers in the password ***/
 preg_match_all('/[0-9]/', $password, $numbers);
 $strength += count($numbers[0]);
 
 /*** check for special chars ***/
 preg_match_all('/[|!@#$%&*\/=?,;.:\-_+~^\\\]/', $password, $specialchars);
 $strength += sizeof($specialchars[0]);
 
 /*** get the number of unique chars ***/
 $chars = str_split($password);
 $num_unique_chars = sizeof( array_unique($chars) );
 $strength += $num_unique_chars * 2;
 
 /*** strength is a number 1-100; ***/
 $strength = $strength > 99 ? 99 : $strength;
 //$strength = floor($strength / 10 + 1);
 
 if ($strength<$params['score']) 
         $this->addError($attribute,"Password is too weak - try using CAPITALS, Num8er5, AND sp&euro;c!al characters. Your score was ".$strength."/".$params['score']); 
 else
     return true;
 }
 
 public function beforeSave() {
 parent::beforeSave();
 //add the password hash if it's a new record
 if ($this->isNewRecord) {
     $this->password = md5($this->passwordSave); 
     $this->create_date=new CDbExpression("NOW()");
     $this->password_expiry_date=new CDbExpression("DATE_ADD(NOW(), INTERVAL 90 DAY) ");
 }       
 else if (!empty($this->passwordSave)&&!empty($this->repeatPassword)&&($this->passwordSave===$this->repeatPassword)) 
 //if it's not a new password, save the password only if it not empty and the two passwords match
 {
     $this->password = md5($this->passwordSave);
     $this->password_expiry_date=new CDbExpression("DATE_ADD(NOW(), INTERVAL 90 DAY) ");
 }
 return true;
 }

/**
* Compare Expiry date and today’s date
* @return type – positive number equals valid user
*/
public function checkExpiryDate() {
    $expDate=DateTime::createFromFormat(‘Y-m-d H:i:s’,$this->password_expiry_date);
    $today=new DateTime(“now”);
    return ($today->diff($expDate)->format(‘%a’));
}

 /**
  * @return array relational rules.
  */
 public function relations()
 {
 // SAMPLE RELATIONS - You will need to change these depending on your application
 'issues' => array(self::HAS_MANY, 'Issues', 'reported_by'),
 'issues1' => array(self::HAS_MANY, 'Issues', 'assigned_to'),
 );
 }
 
 /**
  * @return array customized attribute labels (name=>label)
  */
 public function attributeLabels()
 {
 return array(
 'id' => 'ID',
 'username' => 'Username',
 'password' => 'Password',
 'email' => 'Email',
 'pagination' => 'pagination',
 'createtime' => 'Createtime',
 'last_login_time' => 'last_login_time',
 'role' => 'role',
 'status' => 'Status',
 'passwordSave' => 'Password', 
 'passwordRepeat' => 'Repeat Password', 
 );
 }
 
 /**
  * Retrieves a list of models based on the current search/filter conditions.
  * @return CActiveDataProvider the data provider that can return the models based on the search/filter conditions.
  */
 public function search()
 {
 // Warning: Please modify the following code to remove attributes that
 // should not be searched.
 
 $criteria=new CDbCriteria;
 
 $criteria->compare('id',$this->id);
 $criteria->compare('username',$this->username,true);
 $criteria->compare('password',$this->password,true);
 $criteria->compare('email',$this->email,true);
 $criteria->compare('pagination',$this->pagination,true);
 $criteria->compare('createtime',$this->createtime);
 $criteria->compare('last_login_time',$this->last_login_time);
 $criteria->compare('role',$this->role);
 $criteria->compare('status',$this->status);
 
 return new CActiveDataProvider($this, array(
 'criteria'=>$criteria,
 ));
 }
}

The userIdentity class

Next we will change the original Gii generated userIdentity class to authenticate the user against our new User table.

This is found in Protected/Compontents/UserIdentity.php and will look like this:-

/**
 * UserIdentity represents the data needed to identity a user.
 * It contains the authentication method that checks if the provided
 * data can identity the user.
 */
class UserIdentity extends CUserIdentity
{
 /**
  * Authenticates a user.
  * Authenticate against our Database
  * @return boolean whether authentication succeeds.
  */
        private $_id;
        private $_username;
        public function getName()
        {
           return $this->_username;
        }
        public function getId()
        {
           return $this->_id;
        }
 
        public function authenticate()
        {
            $user= Users::model()->find('LOWER(username)=?', array(strtolower($this->username)));
            if($user === null)
             {
                 $this->errorCode= self::ERROR_UNKNOWN_IDENTITY;
             }
             elseif($user->password !== md5($this->password))
             {
                 $this->errorCode= self::ERROR_PASSWORD_INVALID;
             }
             else
             {
                 $this->_id = $user->id;
                 $this->_username = $user->email;
                 $user->last_login_time=new CDbExpression("NOW()");
                 $user->save();
                 $this->errorCode= self::ERROR_NONE;
             }
                 return !$this->errorCode;
         }
    }

We now have a basic but working database Authentication system and in the next Tutorial I’ll be extending the CWebUer class … coming soon!

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credits: I found the CheckStrength algorithm on Snipplr.com with a deadlink, so I cannot properly credit the original author

We all know that obscurity is no substitute for proper security in any web application, particularly those using AJAX but it does have it’s place in our arsenal towards securing our web applications.

I’m not going to make this article into a big discussion for all the different ways of one can structure the application to truly separate the User functions from the Admin ones but I will mention the two methods that I have tried.  Firstly, is to move all admin actions into an Admin module and secondly, to build completely separate Admin apps or even role based apps; Admin, Employee, Public ….

Another method I have started playing with, more for the small to medium sized app is to obscure the admin URLs using the URL manager and here is how;-

 
'hiddenconsole/<model:.*?>'=>'<model>/admin',
 '<model:.*?>/admin'=>'site/error',

Obviously, where you change hiddenconsole to something obscure …

So your new URLs will look like this: http://your-domain.com/hiddenconsole/posts

Beneath the light-hearted presentation of this book is a wealth of innovative methods of implementation, from RBAC security to job scheduling and mobile browser presentation.

Whether you are just starting out with Yii, or even if you have been using Yii and other frameworks for a few years, you are bound to find many useful tips buried with this super-hero based application.

As a seasoned developer myself, this book will certainly remain close to hand for a good while yet.

You can find more details and buy the book here

You can configure different “log routes” depending on the log trace level, the log category (more on that later) and even your IP address.

I’ve already covered some configurations in my article “Advanced Logging in Yii” that covers enabling profiling in Firefox, but recently I needed to increase the number of log files that were being kept by the server.  I was trying to hunt down a particularly elusive bug when the events happened over a weekend.  By the time I got to look into it on the Monday morning, all the logs had rolled forward and lost the necessary information.

So, I started looking into how to extend the log rolls and even hold info information in another log file.  If you’ve read my previous article you will have seen that I have included a logging function in my bootstrap index.php file called ‘fb’ which outputs to the log file.  So, in my code, I can just write fb(“Some message $variable”,”category.hierarchy”) or even just fb($variable).

So, I changed my fb function to prepend all categories with “Application.” as follows:-

function fb($what,$where='fb.somewhere'){
    $what=print_r($what,true);
    Yii::log($what, 'info', 'application.'.$where);
}

I then decided to output all info messages to a separate log file called application_info and extend the number of versions of this file from the default 5 to 10.  I also included the category ‘system.db.CDbCommand’ which logs SQL from CdbCommand objects where I often use more complex joins.

All other messages would still get logged to the default application log.

  'log'=>array(
 'class'=>'CLogRouter',
 'routes'=>array(
                             array(
                                'class'=>'CFileLogRoute',
                                'levels'=>'info, vardump',
                                'logFile'=>'application_info',
                                'maxLogFiles'=>10
                            ),
                             array(
                                'class'=>'CFileLogRoute',
                                'levels'=>'trace',
                                'logFile'=>'application_info',
                                'maxLogFiles'=>10,
                                'categories'=>'system.db.CDbCommand'
                            ),
                            array(
                                'class'=>'CFileLogRoute',
                                'levels'=>'trace, error, warning',
                            ),
                           array(
                                'class'=>'ext.yii-debug-toolbar.YiiDebugToolbarRoute',
                                'ipFilters'=>array('127.0.0.1','192.168.1.1'),
                            ),
                         /*   array(
                                'class'=>'CFileLogRoute',
                                'levels'=>'trace, info, error, warning, vardump', //info, error, warning, vardump',
                            ),
                            array(
                                'class'=>'CEmailLogRoute',
                                'levels'=>'error, warning',
                                'emails'=>'me@me.com',
                            ),*/
 ),
 ),

I wanted to use the ‘except’ parameter as outlined on The Definitive Guide to Yii but got an error “Property “CFileLogRoute.except” is not defined.” but couldn’t find anything more about this property …. feedback welcome!

To implement this, in each of your data models, use a behaviors function as follows:-

public function behaviors(){
           return array(
              'CTimestampbehavior' => array(
                 'class' => 'zii.behaviors.CTimestampbehavior',
                 'createAttribute' => null,
                 'updateAttribute' => 'last_updated',
                 'setUpdateOnCreate' => true,
                 )
           );
        }

Note that in my model, I have set the CREATE attribute to NULL as my table does not have a created_dt column. Also, the last_updated column is updated on create by the option ‘SetUpdateOnCreate’ being set to TRUE.

See also how to use behaviors to manage Create and Update Dates

To individually style each row of your CGridView you can use the rowCssClassExpression property. However, the first thing that you will notice is that your ODD and EVEN formatting disappears.  That is because the rowCssClassExpression overwrites any internal defaults.

If you want to retain this or include other complex formatting rules, it can get a bit confusing trying to get everything to fit inside a quoted string.  For example:-

'rowCssClassExpression'=>'($row%2)? "even ".str_replace(","," ",$data->flags) : "odd ".str_replace(","," ",$data->flags)';
 

And this is relatively simple.  What if I wanted to check the value of other fields as well … perhaps something like this:-

function () { $ret=($row%2)? "even" :  "odd"; if ($e=='B') $ret.=' BK'; if ($e=='P') $ret.=' PR'; if (strpos($f,'UNREAD',0)>-1) $ret.=' UNREAD'; return $ret; }

This could return a string like “ODD PR UNREAD”

Creating a Component

The best way I’ve found so far, is to create a really simple component with a function that returns the list of classes that you want to add.

1.  create a file ERowClass in your protected/components directory

2. Add code similar to the following

class ERowClass {
            public function rowClass($row, $e, $f) {
            $ret=($row%2)? "even" :  "odd";
            if ($e=='B') $ret.=' BK';
            if ($e=='P') $ret.=' PR';
            if (strpos($f,'UNREAD',0)>-1) $ret.=' UNREAD';
            return $ret;
        }
 
}
?>

3. Call this component from your rowCssClassExpression

$this->widget('zii.widgets.grid.CGridView', array(
 'id'=>'email-grid',
 'dataProvider'=>$model->search(),
        'filter'=>$model,
        'rowCssClassExpression'=>'ERowClass::rowClass($row,$data->entity_type,$data->flags);',
 'columns'=>array(
                ....
          ),

4. Make sure that the component is loaded in your config/main.php

	'import'=>array(
		'application.models.*',
		'application.components.*',
                'application.helpers.*',
                'application.components.ERowClass',
                 ...
             ),

But just in case there is somebody else out there, mad enough to try this -> and if you do, please just drop a comment below to let me know how you got on!

THE SCENARIO

I have developed a holiday reservation system in which a customer has one or more booking-enquiries for a property which has many features.

Now I would like to provide a CGRIDVIEW with an Advanced Search form that enables me to query this whole chain.

I decided therefore to create a sub-query as follows:

SELECT customer.* 
FROM customer
WHERE customer.id IN (
   SELECT DISTINCT `cs`.`id`
   FROM `customer` `cs`
   LEFT JOIN `booking` `bk` ON cs.id = bk.customer_id
   LEFT JOIN `properties` ON bk.property_id = properties.id
   LEFT JOIN `vwpropertyalloptions` ON properties.id = vwpropertyalloptions.id
      WHERE (booking_status='BOOKED') AND (option_id IN (1,2,3,4,5))
)

So, note that the Parameters are in the sub-query.  How the heck do you do this simply in Yii???

Basically, I copied the standard Search  function in the Customer model and called it searchAdvanced()

I added the search fields for all the other entities as Public properties of the customer model

    public $asBookingStatus;
    public $asBookingFrom1;
    public $asBookingFrom2;
 

In the normal way I then went about populating the standard CDbCriteria object

              $criteria=new CDbCriteria;
              $criteria->compare('segment',$this->segment,true);
       $criteria->compare('temperature',$this->temperature,true);
 
                /** Setup Booking Conditions
                 * 
                **/
              $criteria->compare('booking_from',$this->asBookingFrom);
              $criteria->compare('booking_to',$this->asBookingTo);
 
              .....
 
             /** Setup Property Conditions **/
 
             .....

Now comes the clever bits.  

Rather than using that CdbCriteria in the usual way, I have used it to handle all the messy bits about using parameters, like strings and arrays, column types, and PDO validation etc…

So I grab the WHERE clause and the PARAMS from the CdbCriteria which it has made them all nice and pretty for me.

                $where=$criteria->condition;
                $params=$criteria->params;
 

 I then created the SQL for my sub-select using a command object and inserted the where and params from above:-

                $subSQL=Yii::app()->db->createCommand()
                    ->select('cs.id')
                    ->from('customer cs')
                    ->leftjoin('booking bk', 'cs.id = bk.customer_id')
                    ->leftjoin('properties', 'bk.property_id = properties.id')
                    ->leftjoin('vwpropertyalloptions', 'properties.id = vwpropertyalloptions.id')
                    ->where($where, $params)
                        ->group('cs.id')
                    ->text;

This gives me the full SQL that I need to insert into the main query:-

                $sql="SELECT * FROM customer where id in ($subSQL)";
                $dataProvider=new CSqlDataProvider($sql, array(
                    'params'=>$params, // this is actually adding the parameters to the sub-query
                    'totalItemCount'=>$count, // see note below
                    'sort'=>array(
                        'attributes'=>array(
                            'firstname','surname','address',
                        ),
                    ),
                    'pagination'=>array(
                        'pageSize'=>10,
                    ),
                ));
 
                return $dataProvider;
 

There is one complication. If you want to use the standard Yii pagination, you must pass the CSqlDataProvider object the number of rows that this query returns.

Normally, this would be a simple $count=Yii::app()->db->createCommand(‘Select count(*) from customer’)->queryScalar

but we need to apply all the Conditions and Parameters as well.  So we need to build a COUNT query before building the CSqlDataProvider using a query like this:-

                $count = Yii::app()->db->createCommand()
                    ->select('count(DISTINCT cs.id)')
                    ->from('customer cs')
                    ->leftjoin('booking bk', 'cs.id = bk.customer_id')
                    ->leftjoin('properties', 'bk.property_id = properties.id')
                    ->leftjoin('vwpropertyalloptions', 'properties.id = vwpropertyalloptions.id')
                    ->where($where, $params)
                    ->queryScalar();
 

So the final SearchAdvanced() function looks like this

        public function searchAdvanced()
        {
                $criteria=new CDbCriteria;
                $criteria->compare('segment',$this->segment,true);
                $criteria->compare('temperature',$this->temperature,true);
 
                /** Setup Booking Conditions
                 * 
                **/
 
                $criteria->compare('booking_from',$this->asBookingFrom);
                $criteria->compare('booking_to',$this->BookingTo);
 
                /**
                 * Setup Property Criteria
                 */
 
                $criteria->compare('sleeps',$this->asSleeps,true);
                $criteria->compare('bedrooms',$this->asBedrooms,true);
 
                /**
                 * Now setup IN conditions 
                 */
 
                if ($this->asBookingStatus) 
                     $criteria->addInCondition('booking_status',$this->asBookingStatus);
                if ($this->asFeatures)
                     $criteria->addInCondition('option_id',$this->asFeatures);
 
                $where=$criteria->condition;
                $params=$criteria->params;
 
                unset($criteria);
 
                $count = Yii::app()->db->createCommand()
                    ->select('count(DISTINCT cs.id)')
                    ->from('customer cs')
                    ->leftjoin('booking bk', 'cs.id = bk.customer_id')
                    ->leftjoin('properties', 'bk.property_id = properties.id')
                    ->leftjoin('vwpropertyalloptions', 'properties.id = vwpropertyalloptions.id')
                    ->where($where, $params)
                    ->queryScalar();
 
                // Annoying but you have to recreate the whole statement
                // just to change the SELECT clause!
                $subSQL=Yii::app()->db->createCommand()
                    ->select('cs.id')
                    ->from('customer cs')
                    ->leftjoin('booking bk', 'cs.id = bk.customer_id')
                    ->leftjoin('properties', 'bk.property_id = properties.id')
                    ->leftjoin('vwpropertyalloptions', 'properties.id = vwpropertyalloptions.id')
                    ->where($where, $params)
                        ->group('cs.id')
                    ->text;
 
 
                $sql="SELECT * FROM customer where id in ($subSQL)";
                $dataProvider=new CSqlDataProvider($sql, array(
                    'params'=>$params,
                    'totalItemCount'=>$count,
                    'sort'=>array(
                        'attributes'=>array(
                            'firstname','surname','address',
                        ),
                    ),
                    'pagination'=>array(
                        'pageSize'=>10,
                    ),
                ));
 
                return $dataProvider;
 }

I recently needed to run through all records in a table and recalculate some variables.  However, the lovely php was giving me a memory exceeded error after about 2000 records.  

I assumed that all the model objects were not being cleared down properly, so I wanted to try and process batches of records and then use unset after each batch to clear down all the model entries.

But I struggled to find out how to simple implement the MySQL “LIMIT from,chunk” syntax.

The solution, as often, was quite simple.

$chunk=1000;      
 
for ($i = 0; $i <= $total; $i=$i+$chunk) {
 
                $criteria=new CDbCriteria;                       
 
                $criteria->offset=$i;
                $criteria->limit=$chunk;            
 
                $recs=Article::model()->findAll($criteria);
 
                foreach ($recs as $rec) {
                /** Processing here **/
                }
 
                unset ($rec);
                unset ($recs);
}

Note:  It didn’t actually get rid of my memory exceeded messages but I could process many more records!

The CDbCriteria class reference page stipulates that the allowed values are:

the column value to be compared with. If the value is a string, the aforementioned intelligent comparison will be conducted. If the value is an array, the comparison is done by exact match of any of the value in the array. If the string or the array is empty, the existing search condition will not be modified.

For example, I am building a bug/issue tracker and I want the admin grid to only display outstanding bugs by default.

I have a list of valid statuses in my options table and I’m going to say that anything with a sort_order < 10 is outstanding, anything greater is completed. The obvious place to do this is in the Issue->search() function.

$criteria->compare(‘status’, array(…));  //here place an array of valid statuses

Firstly, what is a nice quick and easy way to extract the array of statuses from the Options table.  I’ve seen a number of posts about this including using listData on a model, which is very wasteful.

I think this is probably the most elegant solution

$ostatuses = Yii::app()->db->createCommand('SELECT option_code FROM options WHERE option_name=\'ISSUE-STATUS\' and sort_order<10')->queryAll();
$ost=array();
foreach ($ostatuses as $or) {
      $ost[]=$or['option_code'];
}
criteria->compare('status',$ost);

1. Query the Options table to extract the “outstanding” status codes
But note that the array returned is a 2 dimensional array – one that the compare function does not like.  It looks something like this:

Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[option_code] => CLOSED
)
[1] => Array
(
[option_code] => CUST
)
[2] => Array
(
[option_code] => DEV
)
[3] => Array
(
[option_code] => INV
)
[4] => Array
(
[option_code] => READY
)
[5] => Array
(
[option_code] => REP
)
)

2. Define our new empty array
3.4.5. Loop each first dimension and add the ‘option_code’ element to our new array

One more thing

Now that I have limited my search to only display outstanding bugs, it will always do this.  So I’ve added a property to the Issue model that I can set if I want to display all statues.

At the top of the model declare a public variable

class Issue extends CActiveRecord
{
        public $os_only=true;

So, by default, the variable is set to true

Then in the search function add a check for the value of this property

                IF ($this->os_only) {
>findAll('option_name=:op',array(':op'=>'ISSUE-STATUS')), 'option_name', '');
                    $ostatuses = Yii::app()->db->createCommand('SELECT option_code FROM options WHERE option_name=\'ISSUE-STATUS\' and sort_order<10')->queryAll();
                    $ost=array();
                    foreach ($ostatuses AS $or) {
                        $ost[]=$or['option_code'];
                    }
                    $criteria->compare('status',$ost);
 
                } ELSE {
 
                    $criteria->compare('status',$this-STATUS);
                }

I guess a slightly better way to do this might be using scopes, so watch this space for that …