Dynamically Loading A Controller

Yii 1.1 General Discussion
1

I posted this on Stack Overflow as well.

I have had a good play around with the Yii Framework and now I want to take it a bit deeper and what I want to do is set up an application where several different URLs would point to the same controller.

Normally domain.com/content will point to class ContentController which is standard in MVC.

What I want to do is set up three controllers (maybe more but this will do to start), i.e. ArticlesController, DisplayController and SplashController.

I would then set up what is essentially a CMS for a client, and they would be able to create as many pages as they want and point them to the above three controllers, which I have already set up to handle the data.

So for instance my client could set up the following pages: news, notices, technical and have them all pointed to the ArticlesController, and also set up pages: management, specials, support and have them all pointed to the DisplayController.

I know that all those controllers could be creating using the Gii module, but in this case its not an option as I don’t think that’s suitable for non technical people.

I just want my client to be able to log into the CMS, decide he wants to create a new page called "randompage", point it to the ArticlesController using a drop down menu, then write a bunch of articles for it and now have those articles accessible at domain.com/randompage/article-1 domain.com/randompage/article-2

With the standard set up that would point to site/error because there is no controller RandompageController

What I’ve done so far is create a constructor in Controller class where I can overwrite the controller id


class Controller extends CController {

    function __construct($id) {

        // Code here which successfully pulls from the database

        // which controller the current page should point to.

        parent::__construct($newControllerID)

    }

}

If I check in the CController class, $this->_id = either articles, display or splash but the application itself stills loads site/error

I’m guessing I must have to set/override the Controller elsewhere. I have tried


Yii::app()->setController($newControllerID)

but that doesn’t have any effect

Perhaps Yii is set up and must require a specific controller for each URL but that would mean developing rather rigid solutions for clients, and requiring them to call in the developer every time they want to add a new controller.

One other solution I’ve thought if is that I could load all pages and their controller’s from the database when I start up the application and load them into the url of the config/main.php file?

Hope I have explained what I’m trying to do well.

2

Hi,

You could call internally Gii methods to generate all nesessar Controllers/models without involves the users.

Also another way: A simple trick to do that is using one controller/action with parameters that those parameters are the real controller action!

for example


public function actionMain($controller='site',$action='index') {

  //make anything you want with $controller and $action

}

And call this by


localhost/yourproject/index.php?r=site/main&controller=another_c&action=another_a
3

I posted this in a different topic a while ago which I can’t find anymore, but you should use custom URL rule classes.

In this class you can query the database and return which controller and action Yii should run. See the example.

4

Thanks mate, that is exactly what I need.