I’m just now beginning the process of working with phpcake, and have what I believe to be a very easy question that others before have probably already asked. I have looked but, have been unable to find an answer to my question.
The fundamental concept of cakephp is the beautiful Idea that you design your database, you perform the bake function and the application magically appears. It’s a fantastic starting point, the developer needs to go in an tweak a bit to meet the business needs.
However, and here is where my question comes in, if the database structure changes, re baking the cake destroys all the customization.
yes, I’m aware it asks specifically which portions should be allowed to be overwritten, but what does one do when they want some of that automatic baking to be done for the new fields, and leave the old ones alone?
I’m looking for some way that I don’t modify the code that’s built by the system, I want to specify over-rides for the pre-built code in a separate place that won’t get killed.
I’m certain that I’m not the first to think of this, there must be some type of event handlers that I can hook into. What should my search criteria be when looking for more information on the topic?
Well, like I said, I’m a newbie. But, only a newbie to cake, I’ve done a lot of database work and I know that frequently developing it wrong but close is less time consuming than documenting to the N-th degree prior to development. Frequently the people paying the bills lack the skills to know what they want, until they have something in from of them that they can pick apart and better explain what they really want.
As I see it, if a field should displayed as a “yes/no” radio box, or a state selection, I would like to be able to configure somewhere outside of the pre-generated structure that a specific field in a specific table should be handled in a certain way. That way when the generic $this->Form->input method is called it can maintain my business logic through the bake process.
I can’t be the first person to think of this. I assume that the capability already exists in there, but, I just can’t seem to find it.