Getting Started with Zend Framework
In This Article
Routing and controllers
We will build a very simple inventory system to display our album collection. The home page will list our collection and allow us to add, edit and delete albums. Hence the following pages are required:
Page | Description |
---|---|
Home | This will display the list of albums and provide links to edit and delete them. Also, a link to enable adding new albums will be provided. |
Add new album | This page will provide a form for adding a new album. |
Edit album | This page will provide a form for editing an album. |
Delete album | This page will confirm that we want to delete an album and then delete it. |
Before we set up our files, it's important to understand how the framework
expects the pages to be organised. Each page of the application is known as an
action and actions are grouped into controllers within modules. Hence, you
would generally group related actions into a controller; for instance, a news
controller might have actions of current
, archived
, and view
.
As we have four pages that all apply to albums, we will group them in a single
controller AlbumController
within our Album
module as four actions. The four
actions will be:
Page | Controller | Action |
---|---|---|
Home | AlbumController |
index |
Add new album | AlbumController |
add |
Edit album | AlbumController |
edit |
Delete album | AlbumController |
delete |
The mapping of a URL to a particular action is done using routes that are
defined in the module’s module.config.php
file. We will add a route for our
album actions. This is the updated module config file with the new code
highlighted using comments.
namespace Album;
use Zend\Router\Http\Segment;
use Zend\ServiceManager\Factory\InvokableFactory;
return [
'controllers' => [
'factories' => [
Controller\AlbumController::class => InvokableFactory::class,
],
],
// The following section is new and should be added to your file:
'router' => [
'routes' => [
'album' => [
'type' => Segment::class,
'options' => [
'route' => '/album[/:action[/:id]]',
'constraints' => [
'action' => '[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9_-]*',
'id' => '[0-9]+',
],
'defaults' => [
'controller' => Controller\AlbumController::class,
'action' => 'index',
],
],
],
],
],
'view_manager' => [
'template_path_stack' => [
'album' => __DIR__ . '/../view',
],
],
];
The name of the route is ‘album’ and has a type of ‘segment’. The segment route
allows us to specify placeholders in the URL pattern (route) that will be mapped
to named parameters in the matched route. In this case, the route is
/album[/:action[/:id]]
which will match any URL that starts with /album
.
The next segment will be an optional action name, and then finally the next
segment will be mapped to an optional id. The square brackets indicate that a
segment is optional. The constraints section allows us to ensure that the
characters within a segment are as expected, so we have limited actions to
starting with a letter and then subsequent characters only being alphanumeric,
underscore, or hyphen. We also limit the id to digits.
This route allows us to have the following URLs:
URL | Page | Action |
---|---|---|
/album |
Home (list of albums) | index |
/album/add |
Add new album | add |
/album/edit/2 |
Edit album with an id of 2 | edit |
/album/delete/4 |
Delete album with an id of 4 | delete |
Create the controller
We are now ready to set up our controller. For zend-mvc, the controller
is a class that is generally called {Controller name}Controller
; note that
{Controller name}
must start with a capital letter. This class lives in a file
called {Controller name}Controller.php
within the Controller
subdirectory for
the module; in our case that is module/Album/src/Controller/
. Each action
is a public method within the controller class that is named {action
name}Action
, where {action name}
should start with a lower case
letter.
Conventions not strictly enforced
This is by convention. zend-mvc doesn't provide many restrictions on controllers other than that they must implement the
Zend\Stdlib\Dispatchable
interface. The framework provides two abstract classes that do this for us:Zend\Mvc\Controller\AbstractActionController
andZend\Mvc\Controller\AbstractRestfulController
. We'll be using the standardAbstractActionController
, but if you’re intending to write a RESTful web service,AbstractRestfulController
may be useful.
Let’s go ahead and create our controller class in the file
zf-tutorials/module/Album/src/Controller/AlbumController.php
:
namespace Album\Controller;
use Zend\Mvc\Controller\AbstractActionController;
use Zend\View\Model\ViewModel;
class AlbumController extends AbstractActionController
{
public function indexAction()
{
}
public function addAction()
{
}
public function editAction()
{
}
public function deleteAction()
{
}
}
We have now set up the four actions that we want to use. They won't work yet until we set up the views. The URLs for each action are:
URL | Method called |
---|---|
http://zf-tutorial.localhost/album |
Album\Controller\AlbumController::indexAction |
http://zf-tutorial.localhost/album/add |
Album\Controller\AlbumController::addAction |
http://zf-tutorial.localhost/album/edit |
Album\Controller\AlbumController::editAction |
http://zf-tutorial.localhost/album/delete |
Album\Controller\AlbumController::deleteAction |
We now have a working router and the actions are set up for each page of our application.
It's time to build the view and the model layer.
Initialise the view scripts
To integrate the view into our application, we need to create some view script
files. These files will be executed by the DefaultViewStrategy
and will be
passed any variables or view models that are returned from the controller action
method. These view scripts are stored in our module’s views directory within a
directory named after the controller. Create these four empty files now:
module/Album/view/album/album/index.phtml
module/Album/view/album/album/add.phtml
module/Album/view/album/album/edit.phtml
module/Album/view/album/album/delete.phtml
We can now start filling everything in, starting with our database and models.
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