YII2 Introduction

Sílvio Priem Mendes, PhD

 • YII2 Intro • HTTP Requests
• YII2 MVC Intro • HTTP Request URLs
• The Model • HTTP Request Methods
• The Controller • HTTP Headers
• The View • HTTP Responses
• YII2 Application Structure • HTTP Status Codes
• YII2 Request Lifecycle • HTTP Headers
• Bootstrapping • HTTP Response Body
• HTTP Redirect
• Sending Files
• Flushing a Response

TOC 2
• Yii is a high performance, component-based PHP
framework for rapidly developing modern Web
applications.

• The name Yii (pronounced Yee or [ji:]) means "simple

and evolutionary" in Chinese.

• It can also be thought of as an acronym for Yes It Is!

YII2 intro 3
• How does Yii Compare with Other Frameworks?
• Like most PHP frameworks, Yii implements the MVC
(Model-View-Controller) architectural pattern and
promotes code organization based on that pattern.
• Yii is a full-stack framework providing many proven and
ready-to-use features: query builders and ActiveRecord
for both relational and NoSQL databases; RESTful API
development support; multi-tier caching support;
• Yii is extremely extensible. You can customize or replace
nearly every piece of the core's code.

YII2 intro 4
• Yii applications are organized according to the model-
view-controller (MVC) architectural pattern.
• Models represent data, business logic and rules;
• views are output representation of models; and
• controllers take input and convert it to commands for
models and views.

YII2 MVC intro 5

• Besides MVC, Yii applications also have the following entities:

• entry scripts: they are PHP scripts that are directly accessible by end users.
They are responsible for starting a request handling cycle.
• applications: they are globally accessible objects that manage application
components and coordinate them to fulfill requests.
• application components: they are objects registered with applications and
provide various services for fulfilling requests.
• modules: they are self-contained packages that contain complete MVC by
themselves. An application can be organized in terms of multiple modules.
• filters: they represent code that need to be invoked before and after the
actual handling of each request by controllers.
• widgets: they are objects that can be embedded in views. They may contain
controller logic and can be reused in different views.

YII2 MVC intro 6

THE MODEL 7
• The EntryForm class contains two public members,
name and email, which are used to store the data entered
by the user.
• It also contains a method named rules(), which returns a
set of rules for validating the data.
• The validation rules declared above state that:
• both the name and email values are required
• the email data must be a syntactically valid email address

THE MODEL 8
THE CONTROLLER 9
• The action first creates an EntryForm object.
• It then tries to populate the model with the data from
$_POST, provided in Yii by yii\web\Request::post().
• If the model is successfully populated (i.e., if the user has
submitted the HTML form), the action will call validate()
to make sure the values entered are valid.

THE CONTROLLER 10
THE VIEW (FORM) 11
• The view uses a powerful widget called ActiveForm to build
the HTML form.
• The begin() and end() methods of the widget render the
opening and closing form tags, respectively.
• Between the two method calls, input fields are created by the
field() method.
• The first input field is for the "name" data, and the second for
the "email" data.
• After the input fields, the yii\helpers\Html::submitButton()
method is called to generate a submit button.

THE VIEW (FORM) 12

THE VIEW OUTPUT 13
• basic/ application base path
• composer.json used by Composer, describes package information
• config/ contains application and other configurations
• console.php the console application configuration
• web.php the Web application configuration
• commands/ contains console command classes
• controllers/ contains controller classes
• models/ contains model classes
• runtime/ contains files generated by Yii during runtime, such as logs and cache
files
• vendor/ contains the installed Composer packages, including the Yii framework
itself
• views/ contains view files
• web/ application Web root, contains Web accessible files
• assets/ contains published asset files (javascript and css) by Yii
• index.php the entry (or bootstrap) script for the application
• yii the Yii console command execution script

APPLICATION STRUCTURE 14
Static structure of an
application. 15
• Each application has an entry script web/index.php which
is the only Web accessible PHP script in the application.
• The entry script takes an incoming request and creates an
application instance to handle it.
• The application resolves the request with the help of its
components, and dispatches the request to the MVC
elements.
• Widgets are used in the views to help build complex and
dynamic user interface elements.

Static structure of an
application. 16
REQUEST LIFECYCLE 17
1. A user makes a request to the entry script web/index.php.
2. The entry script loads the application configuration and creates an
application instance to handle the request.
3. The application resolves the requested route with the help of the request
application component.
4. The application creates a controller instance to handle the request.
5. The controller creates an action instance and performs the filters for the
action.
6. If any filter fails, the action is cancelled.
7. If all filters pass, the action is executed.
8. The action loads a data model, possibly from a database.
9. The action renders a view, providing it with the data model.
10. The rendered result is returned to the response application component.
11. The response component sends the rendered result to the user's browser.

REQUEST LIFECYCLE 18
Bootstrapping refers to the process of preparing the environment
before an application starts to resolve and process an incoming
request.
Bootstrapping is done in two places: the entry script and the
application.

In the entry script, class autoloaders for different libraries are

registered.
This includes the Composer autoloader through its autoload.php
file and the Yii autoloader through its Yii class file.
The entry script then loads the application configuration and
creates an application instance.

BOOTSTRAPPING 19
In the constructor of the application, the following bootstrapping work is
done:

• preInit() is called, which configures some high priority application properties, such as
basePath.
• Register the error handler.
• Initialize application properties using the given application configuration.
• init() is called which in turn calls bootstrap() to run bootstrapping components.
• Include the extension manifest file vendor/yiisoft/extensions.php.
• Create and run bootstrap components declared by extensions.
• Create and run application components and/or modules that are declared in the application's
bootstrap property.

Because the bootstrapping work has to be done before handling every request, it is very
important to keep this process light and optimize it as much as possible.

BOOTSTRAPPING 20
• Try not to register too many bootstrapping components.
• A bootstrapping component is needed only if it wants to participate
the whole life cycle of requesting handling.

• In production mode, enable a bytecode cache, such as PHP OPcache

or APC, to minimize the time needed for including and parsing PHP
files.

• Some large applications have very complex application

configurations which are divided into many smaller configuration
files.
• If this is the case, consider caching the whole configuration array and
loading it directly from cache before creating the application instance
in the entry script.

BOOTSTRAPPING 21
• Requests made to an application are represented in terms
of yii\web\Request objects which provide information
such as request parameters, HTTP headers, cookies, etc.

• For a given request, you can get access to the

corresponding request object via the request application
component which is an instance of yii\web\Request, by
default.

HTTP REQUESTS 22
• To get request parameters, you can call get() and post()
methods of the request component.

• They return the values of $_GET and $_POST,

respectively.

HTTP REQUESTS 23
HTTP REQUESTS 24
• You can get the HTTP method used by the current request
via the expression Yii::$app->request->method.
• A whole set of boolean properties is also provided for you
to check if the current method is of certain type.

HTTP REQUEST METHODS 25

• Assuming the URL being requested is
http://example.com/admin/index.php/product?id=100,
You can get various parts of this URL as summarized in the following:

• url: returns /admin/index.php/product?id=100, which is the URL without

the host info part.
• absoluteUrl: returns
http://example.com/admin/index.php/product?id=100, which is the whole
URL including the host info part.
• hostInfo: returns http://example.com, which is the host info part of the
URL.

HTTP REQUEST URLs 26

• hostInfo: returns http://example.com, which is the host info part of the
URL.
• pathInfo: returns /product, which is the part after the entry script and before
the question mark (query string).
• queryString: returns id=100, which is the part after the question mark.
• baseUrl: returns /admin, which is the part after the host info and before the
entry script name.
• scriptUrl: returns /admin/index.php, which is the URL without path info
and query string.
• serverName: returns example.com, which is the host name in the URL.
• serverPort: returns 80, which is the port used by the Web server.

HTTP REQUEST URLs 27

• The request component also provides support for quickly accessing some
commonly used headers, including:

• userAgent: returns the value of the User-Agent header.

• contentType: returns the value of the Content-Type header which
indicates the MIME type of the data in the request body.

HTTP HEADERS 28
• When an application finishes handling a request, it
generates a response object and sends it to the end user.
• The response object contains information such as the
HTTP status code, HTTP headers and body.

• In most cases you should mainly deal with the response

application component which is an instance of
yii\web\Response, by default.

• Yii also allows you to create your own response objects

and send them to end users

HTTP RESPONSES 29
• Example, to indicate the request is successfully handled, you
may set the status code to be 200, like the following:

• Yii::$app->response->statusCode = 200;

• However, in most cases you do not need to explicitly set the

status code because the default value of
yii\web\Response::$statusCode is 200. And if you want to
indicate the request is unsuccessful, you may throw an
appropriate HTTP exception like the following:

• throw new \yii\web\NotFoundHttpException;

HTTP STATUS CODE 30

• When the error handler catches an exception, it will extract the
status code from the exception and assign it to the response.
• For the yii\web\NotFoundHttpException above, it is
associated with the HTTP status 404. The following HTTP
exceptions are predefined in Yii:

• yii\web\BadRequestHttpException: status code 400.

• yii\web\ConflictHttpException: status code 409.
• yii\web\ForbiddenHttpException: status code 403.
• yii\web\GoneHttpException: status code 410.
• yii\web\MethodNotAllowedHttpException: status code 405.
• yii\web\NotAcceptableHttpException: status code 406.

HTTP STATUS CODE 31

• yii\web\NotAcceptableHttpException: status code 406.
• yii\web\NotFoundHttpException: status code 404.
• yii\web\ServerErrorHttpException: status code 500.
• yii\web\TooManyRequestsHttpException: status code 429.
• yii\web\UnauthorizedHttpException: status code 401.
• yii\web\UnsupportedMediaTypeHttpException: status code 415.

• If the exception that you want to throw is not among the above list,
you may create one by extending from yii\web\HttpException, or
directly throw it with a status code, for example,

• throw new \yii\web\HttpException(402);

HTTP STATUS CODE 32

• You can send HTTP headers by manipulating the header
collection in the response component. For example,

HTTP HEADERS 33
• Most responses should have a body which gives the content that you
want to show to end users (usually with valid HTML).

• If you already have a formatted body string, you may assign it to the
yii\web\Response::$content property of the response. For example,

• Yii::$app->response->content = 'hello world!';

• If your data needs to be formatted before sending it to end users, you

should set both of the format and data properties. The format property
specifies in which format the data should be formatted. For example,

• $response = Yii::$app->response;
• $response->format = \yii\web\Response::FORMAT_JSON;
• $response->data = ['message' => 'hello world'];

HTTP RESPONSE BODY 34

• Yii supports the following formats out of the box, each
implemented by a formatter class. You can customize these
formatters or add new ones by configuring the
yii\web\Response::$formatters property.

• HTML: implemented by yii\web\HtmlResponseFormatter.

• XML: implemented by yii\web\XmlResponseFormatter.
• JSON: implemented by yii\web\JsonResponseFormatter.
• JSONP: implemented by yii\web\JsonResponseFormatter.
• RAW: use this format if you want to send the response directly
without applying any formatting.

HTTP RESPONSE BODY 35

• While the response body can be set explicitly as shown above,
in most cases you may set it implicitly by the return value of
action methods. A common use case is like the following:

• The index action above returns the rendering result of the

index view. The return value will be taken by the response
component, formatted and then sent to end users.

• Because by default the response format is HTML, you should

only return a string in an action method.

HTTP RESPONSE BODY 36

• If you want to use a different response format, you should
set it first before returning the data. For example,

HTTP RESPONSE BODY 37

• Browser redirection relies on sending a Location HTTP header. Because
this feature is commonly used, Yii provides some special support for it.

• You can redirect the user browser to a URL by calling the

yii\web\Response::redirect() method.
• The method sets the appropriate Location header with the given URL
and returns the response object itself.
• In an action method, you can call its shortcut version
yii\web\Controller::redirect().

HTTP REDIRECT 38
• Like browser redirection, file sending is another feature that relies on
specific HTTP headers. Yii provides a set of methods to support
various file sending needs. They all have built-in support for the
HTTP range header.

• yii\web\Response::sendFile(): sends an existing file to a client.

• yii\web\Response::sendContentAsFile(): sends a text string as a file
to a client.
• yii\web\Response::sendStreamAsFile(): sends an existing file
stream as a file to a client.
• These methods have the same method signature with the response object
as the return value. If the file to be sent is very big, you should consider
using yii\web\Response::sendStreamAsFile() because it is more memory
efficient.

RESPONSE - SENDING FILES 39

• If you are calling the file sending method in places other
than an action method, you should also call
the yii\web\Response::send() method afterwards to ensure
no extra content will be appended to the response.

RESPONSE - SENDING FILES 40

• The content in a response is not sent to the user until
the yii\web\Response::send() method is called.
• By default, this method will be called automatically at the end
of yii\base\Application::run(). You can, however, explicitly call this method
to force sending out the response immediately.
• The yii\web\Response::send() method takes the following steps to send out a
response:
1. Trigger the yii\web\Response::EVENT_BEFORE_SEND event.
2. Call yii\web\Response::prepare() to format response data into response content.
3. Trigger the yii\web\Response::EVENT_AFTER_PREPARE event.
4. Call yii\web\Response::sendHeaders() to send out the registered HTTP headers.
5. Call yii\web\Response::sendContent() to send out the response body content.
6. Trigger the yii\web\Response::EVENT_AFTER_SEND event.

FLUSHING A RESPONSE 41