0.10 Dev Gotchas!

Note: This page is quite old. — Olle Jonsson 2005/12/12 10:24

These are the things that might hit you when you first install Cake or upgrade from an older version.

Problem: mod_rewrite not enabled.

Solution: Edit line 45 of Cake /app/config/core.php file, and uncomment the line

define ('BASE_URL', $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME']);

If you have mod_rewrite and prefer to use CakePHP pretty URLs you also have to remove the .htaccess files.

These are located in:

unpacked directory/.htaccess

unpacked directory/app/.htaccess

unpacked directory/app/webroot/.htaccess

Fatal error: Class ‘AppController’ not found in /Library/WebServer/Documents/cake/cake/dispatcher.php on line 105.

Problem: Usage of oldstyle ?url= urls.

Solution: Change the style of url from /cake/index.php?url=controller/action to /cake/index.php/controller/action.

This error will occur if you’re running PHP as a CGI process. While the problem lies with the server, if you are unable to change the configuration of the server there is a solution which involves editing cake, ticket 66 documents the problem and solution.

To solve:

// In cake/index.php 
$elements = explode('/index.php?url=',$uri);
 
// In core.php
define('BASE_URL', $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'].'?url=');

These files were moved to the core. If you want to override them create them inside of your /app

Problem: Fatal error: Class pagescontroller: Cannot inherit from undefined class pageshelper

Solution: be sure that your controller is extending AppController.

In version 0.9.1 Cake had “Controller Helpers” – which means that a Controller called MyController extended MyHelper. This was changed in 0.10.0.

Your controllers should now extend AppController.

So, Helpers have taken on a new function. They are used to aid your View now. If your controller still needs help you can create a component.

You can override the Cake core layout by creating a directory at /app/views/layouts, and fill it with layout templates.

AppController.

AppModel.

Go to Extending Cake tutorial to learn the differences.

Ticket 28: Empty parameters in actions are not handled correctly

If you wish to call a cake action using an empty parameter, rather than doing /mycontroller/myaction//2/3 you should insert some form of fake parameter - for example /mycontroller/myaction/void/2/3 (here the word void which will be passed to your action as a string value represents an empty parameter - your action should check for this and URLs should be constructed with the word void where an empty value exists).

This can be due to the Model not having its $name set. Set that to the name of the model class, for the model Product, it is:

class Product extends AppModel 
{
   $name = "Product"; 
}

If you are using radioTags and noticing errors...

Problem: Tag Template for radio input has improper format.

Solution: Open tags.ini.php - Change line 60 (or whatever line the radio tag template is on to:

radio = "<label for="%s"><input type="radio" name="data[%s][%s]" id="%s" %s />%s</label>"

Do not use Controller::flash methods now - you are better off using the Session::setFlash().

Problem: In version 0.10.8.2047, if you use production file layout as recommended in manual (http://manual.cakephp.org/pages/ch03s03), you get warnings from dispatcher.php:baseUrl().

Solution: Open cake/dispatcher.php, go to baseUrl() method and escape the directory separator characters in APP_DIR and WEBROOT_DIR constants used in preg_match() calls. See below:

	$appDir = str_replace(DS, '\\'.DS, APP_DIR);
	$webrootDir = str_replace(DS, '\\'.DS, WEBROOT_DIR);

Now use $appDir and $webrootDir in preg_match() lines in baseUrl() method