array('name','length','min'=>6),
Or both:
array('name','length','min'=>6, 'max'=>40),
|
Another useful validation routine is to check that a string is an email address. I do that here, to a
userEmail field:
array('userEmail', 'email'),
|
To indicate that a string needs to be a URL, use:
Another useful rule is for comparisons, like when a user registers
and you have to make sure that the confirmed password matches the
password:
array('password1', 'compare', 'compareAttribute'=>'password2', 'on'=>'register'),
|
There is also the “safe” rule. This rule is used to provide access to
data that isn’t otherwise validated. For example, an email address is
already considered to be “safe” because it must abide by the email rule,
but the
Employee Model has the
leaveDate
field which won’t have any rules applied to it (in part, because there
are no date-specific rules and also because the field can be null). To
be able to refer to that value, it must be declared as safe:
array('leaveDate', 'safe'),
|
If there are multiple fields to make safe, just separate them with commas.
There’s also a rule to indicate which fields should be safe to search
on. By default, every rule is made safe in a search, but you may want
to change that behavior by removing fields from the list:
array('id, departmentId, firstName, lastName, email, ext, hireDate, leaveDate', 'safe', 'on'=>'search'),
|
So, using this information, the complete
rules() method for my
Employee Model is:
public function rules()
{
return array(
array('departmentId, firstName, lastName, email, hireDate', 'required'),
array('departmentId, ext', 'numerical', 'integerOnly'=>true),
array('firstName', 'length', 'max'=>20),
array('lastName', 'length', 'max'=>40),
array('email', 'length', 'max'=>60),
array('email', 'email'),
array('leaveDate', 'safe'),
array('id, departmentId, firstName, lastName, email, ext, hireDate, leaveDate', 'safe', 'on'=>'search'),
);
}
|
Moving on, another key Model method is
relations(),
which indicates the relationship between Models. If your database is
designed properly, this method will already be properly filled out,
again thanks to Gii. Here’s how the
relations() method in the
Employee Model looks:
public function relations()
{
return array(
'department' => array(self::BELONGS_TO, 'Department', 'departmentId')
);
}
|
The relation is given a name, here
department. The relation indicates that the
departmentId column in the
Employee Model (i.e., this one) belongs to the
Department
Model. Here’s how this will come into play: When loading the
information for an employee, you can also load any of its relations. By
doing so, references to
department will equate to the
Department Model record that is the employee’s department. So if the
$model object represents the
Employee being viewed, then
$model->department->name would be the name of the department that the employee is associated with.
In the Department Model, this relation is defined:
public function relations()
{
return array('employees' => array(self::HAS_MANY, 'Employee', 'departmentId') );
}
|
So if
$model represents a specific
Department being viewed, then
$model->employees is an array of
Employee objects, each of which representing one
Employee in that department.
The relations between Models is a key player in complex MVC sites.
Through properly defined relations, associated content can be retrieved.
You’ll learn more about this in the next couple of posts.
Moving on, a more trivial, but still nice, method is
attributeLabels().
This method returns an associative array of fields and the labels to
use for those fields in forms, error messages, and so forth. The Yii
framework does a great job of making these conversations automatically,
like
firstName becoming
First Name and
departmentId becoming just
Department. But you may want to still customize these. For the
Employee Model, here’s what I have:
public function attributeLabels()
{
return array(
'id' => 'Employee ID',
'departmentId' => 'Department',
'firstName' => 'First Name',
'lastName' => 'Last Name',
'email' => 'Email',
'ext' => 'Ext',
'hireDate' => 'Hire Date',
'leaveDate' => 'Leave Date',
);
}
