Dynamic Database Connection with CakePHP

Recently I was working on a project where I had a central Cake application for a group of clients and each client had their own database.

I wanted to have all users sign into a central user’s table associated with the application, but then for the bulk of the controllers in the app have the database config change based on a field in the user record.

So if Bob Smith from Company A signs in to our app, he needs to use database configuration ‘company_a’.

Since we are using Cake’s built in Auth component, we always have access to the user record in the Session from the controller. But for the life of me, I could not figure out how to get at the Session data from the Model!

I saw several comments in my search that said to just abandon the Cake MVC model and get what I needed from $_SESSION. I had no qualms about doing that, but $_SESSION had no data. I believe this is because Cake overrides PHP’s default session handlers so session data stored by Cake is not going to end up in $_SESSION. Feel free to comment if I am wrong about that.

So I had the data I needed in the controller, but at that point the model has already been instantiated.

But it became a timing issue — ‘mydatabase’ had to be a valid database connection before the controller is even instantiated.

So to fix, a ‘dummy’ database was needed to make the initial connection, then we can make our adjustments in the controller.

function beforeFilter() {
     $config = array(
          'login'    => 'myusername',
          'password' => 'mypassword',
          'database' => $this->Auth->user('company_name')
     );
 
     $db =& ConnectionManager::getDataSource("mydatabase");
     $db->disconnect();
     $db->setConfig($config);
     $db->connect();
}

Drag and Drop with jQuery and CakePHP

Recently I had a need for a data report with shopping cart-like behavior — let the user paginate through a list of items, drag items of interest to a “basket” and then take action on all items in the basket.

To do this, I used the “draggable” and “droppable” functionality in jQuery UI. jQuery makes drag and drop (and everything else) ridiculously easy.

The only trick here was managing the “basket” contents with CakePHP.

My data was laid out in a table, so I took the item name and wrapped it in a div with a ‘draggable’ class like this:

<div class="draggable"><?php echo $item['Item']['name']; ?></div>

Then at the top of the page, I created my “basket” — just a stylized div with a “droppable” class or id, like so:

<div id="basket" class="droppable">Drag items of interest here.</div>

Then in the document ready function, just initialize the drag and drop:

$('.draggable').draggable({ revert: 'valid'; });
$('#droppable').droppable({
     accept: '.draggable',
     hoverClass: 'draggable-active',
     drop: function(event, ui) { doSomeFunction(ui.draggable); }
});