I am working on a project where my client wants to show recent status messages from users on home page, including photo, time, country, city, etc ( I mean more than 2 tables joins). I am stuck here because I am to Yii and I don’t have any idea. How should I implement this system.
I have couples of question regarding this situation. (Please don’t bother I am fairly new)
Which controller action should I use? SITE/INDEX or should I work on new one?
How should I display those headlines.? Should I use CListView() / CGridView or something else?
Should I write custom SQL using DAO?
What best practices would you suggest for me in this situation?
Thanks for reply Matt. It is just like recent updates/statuses of friends in facebook. I have user inputted status message with attachments like photo, links, status message etc.
1st Table (users):
user_id
first_name
last_name
email
password
joined_on
profile_photo (relation with photos table)
country (relation with country look up table)
2nd Table (status message)
id
status
attachtment_id
3rd Table (attachments)
id
attachment_link
user_id
4th table (photos)
id
photo_id
photo_name
5th table (Country)
Basically there are 4-5 tables related with each other. I am not so good in explaining in English. I hope you can understand my goal. It is just like recent updates in facebook, recent tweets in twitter etc.
As others have said there are a number of ways to go about this
Unlike Gerhard says, The ‘use on home page’ requirement dictates using ‘site/index’ some how. Although what is meant by “Users home page?” Then maybe user/index action.
This is a matter of choice: for just listing some information from a db_table, SQL/DAO is usually faster.
You could display the info in the ‘site/index.php’ file, use a renderPartal(’_status’,…), go with a widget (see Blog Demo - Tag Cloud, Recent Comments)
For the index file or renderPartal() options above, you will need to add the $model/$dataprovider as needed by your choice of display widget. The renderPartal() and widget() options allow reuse, if needed elsewhere on the site.
Most tutorials dictate that accessing a db should be done in the controller or in a widget. However you could do it in a partal view (many would say this is a bad idea.)
So my initial thought would be to use a ListView and not a GridView because of the 1 - N relationships.
[size="2"]To make things simple[/size]
[list=1][]Make sure all relations are correctly set up in models[]build a CActiveDataProvider in SiteController’s actionIndex method and pass it to site/index view[list=1][]make sure to use eager loading when retrieving your relations[/list][]In site/index view, construct a CLIstView and pass it the data provider[list=1][*]try to break this step into 2 parts by using renderPartial to display the CListView. Ie. create a new file called _user_status_summary.php and add the CListView to this. Then, in site/index view, renderPartial the newly created view. This helps to break complex views into more manageable pieces. It also makes it easy to [size=2]rip out all the logic from the controller and view and stuff it into a widget if you want to reuse this in other parts of your site. [/size][/list][/list]Depending on your tables’ sizes and the fact that these queries are being executed from the homepage, you’ll also probably want to cache these results using a query cache. This should be done after the fact once you’ve got your views outputting the correct data.
