Cake Factory

Cake is a CakePHP plugin which provides an additional factory for the Cake Toolkit (CTK), adding configurable objects for the core Html and Form helpers available with the framework.

The inclusion of an object-oriented interface for the core helpers allows for a more sophisticated usage, such as adding child nodes and binding events, as well as improving the overall level of abstraction and separation of concerns in the View layer.

Requirements

• CakePHP 2+
• PHP 5.3+
• Cake Toolkit (https://github.com/jameswatts/cake-toolkit)

Installation

To use the plugin simply include it in your application's "app/Plugin" directory, and load it in the "app/Config/bootstrap.php" file.

CakePlugin::load('CakeFactory');

The above code is not required if you're already using CakePlugin::loadAll() to load all plugins.

Implementation

Once the plugin is available it's ready to use in your CTK Views, or with the Factory helper included with the Cake Toolkit. To include the Cake factory in a View just add the factory to your $factories collection, for example:

public $factories = array('CakeFactory.Cake');

With the factory now available you can call it in your View, and build your application using the Html and Form helpers via an object-oriented interface.

Here's a simple example of creating a link from the Html helper:

$this->Cake->Link(array(
	'title' => __('Read more'),
	'url' => array(
		'controller' => 'Posts',
		'action' => 'view',
		$postId
	)
));	

Another example, creating a form with an input from the Form helper, with the additional binding of an event to the input element:

// create a CakePHP form
$form = $this->Cake->Form(array(
	'model' => 'Example',
	'options' => array(
		'action' => 'add'
	)
));
	// create a CakePHP input
	$input = $this->Cake->Input(array(
		'field' => 'Example.column',
		'options' => array(
			'type' => 'text'
		)
	));
	// bind an event to the input
	$input->bind('keyup', $this->Js->Alert(array(
		'code' => $this->Js->Element(array('node' => $input))->getValue()
	)));
// add the input to the form
$form->add($input);
// add the form to the view
$this->add($form);

Documentation

The Cake factory has been designed to follow the existing methods and arguments defined in the CakePHP core helpers. This allows for an easy transition to using the factory, as you'll already be familiar with the parameters expected. The documentation for each helper class can be found here:

• HtmlHelper: http://api.cakephp.org/2.3/class-HtmlHelper.html
• FormHelper: http://api.cakephp.org/2.3/class-FormHelper.html

There have been some modifications to parameter names compared to their equivalent arguments. This is almost always the case for arguments which are composed of 2 or more words, such as the $fieldName argument, which becomes just the field parameter.

Support

For support, bugs and feature requests, please use the issues section of this repository.

Contributing

If you'd like to contribute new features, enhancements or bug fixes to the code base just follow these steps:

• Create a GitHub account, if you don't own one already
• Then, fork the Cake factory repository to your account
• Create a new branch from the develop branch in your forked repository
• Modify the existing code, or add new code to your branch, making sure you follow the CakePHP Coding Standards
• Modify or add unit tests which confirm the correct functionality of your code (requires PHPUnit 3.5+)
• Consider using the CakePHP Code Sniffer to check the quality of your code
• When ready, make a pull request to the main repository

There may be some discussion reagrding your contribution to the repository before any code is merged in, so be prepared to provide feedback on your contribution if required.

A list of contributors to the Cake factory can be found here.

Licence

Copyright 2013 James Watts (CakeDC). All rights reserved.

Licensed under the MIT License. Redistributions of the source code included in this repository must retain the copyright notice found in each file.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Larry Masters and everyone who has contributed to CakePHP, helping make this framework what it is today.