CakePHP Interview Questions

CakePHP is a free, open-source, rapid development framework for PHP. It's a foundational structure for programmers to create web applications. There is a number of inbuilt component like Ajax, RequestHandler, Session, etc. official website of cakephp is https://cakephp.org/

CakePHP is used for rapid development for PHP based web applications, etc.

Model View Controller (MVC) is an architectural pattern used in software engineering.

The model is responsible to manage the data, it stores and retrieves entities used by an application, usually from a database, and contains the logic implemented by the application.  Presentation -Design parts written here Business Logic - The controller handles the model and view layers to work together.

The controller receives a request from the client, invokes the model to perform the requested operations, and sends the data to the View. The view formats the data to be presented to the user, in a web application as an HTML output

There are many few key features are given below:

1. MVC architecture
2. Built-in validations
3. Caching
4. scaffolding
5. Auth & ACL
6. Rapid Development
7. Secure, Scalable and Stable
8. CSRF protection via Security Component

Composer is a tool for managing project dependencies.

You can create a CakePHP project using Composer by running below commands on terminal.

Prerequisite CakePHP 3.x

1. PHP 5.6.0 or greater (including PHP 7.1).
2. mbstring PHP extension installed and enabled
3. intl PHP extension
4. simplexml PHP extension

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1. CakePHP started, in April 2005.
2. CakePHP version 1.0 released in May 2006.

4.x

bootstrap.php is the file that is loaded first when the application run.

You can change this if required, it can be changed either through index.php or .htaccess.

Default file name is database.php.default. Its located in "/app/config/database.php.defaut"

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Default controller is indexController.php and Default function is index.

http://example.com/controller/action/param1/param2/param3 There is two vendor folder, one folder in root and another is in "app" folder

1. The root one is the global vendors folder - if multiple apps share the same root (cake + plugins + vendors)
2. the APP one is the app specific one and takes precedence

find, findAll, findAllBy, findBy, findNeighbours and query.

• bin folder holds the Cake console executables.
• config folder holds the (few) Configuration files CakePHP uses. Database connection details, bootstrapping, core configuration files and more should be stored here.
• plugins folder is where the Plugins your application uses are stored.
• logs folder normally contains your log files, depending on your log configuration.
• src folder will be where you work your magic: it’s where your application’s files will be placed.
• tests folder will be where you put the test cases for your application.
• tmp folder is where CakePHP stores temporary data. The actual data it stores depends on how you have CakePHP configured, but this folder is usually used to store model descriptions and sometimes session information.
• vendor folder is where CakePHP and other application dependencies will be installed. Make a personal commitment not to edit files in this folder. We can’t help you if you’ve modified the core.
• webroot directory is the public document root of your application. It contains all the files you want to be publically reachable.

  Make sure that the tmp and logs folders exist and are writable, otherwise the performance of your application will be severely impacted. In debug mode, CakePHP will warn you, if it is not the case.

• .htaccess
• composer.json
• index.php
• README.md

CakePHP’s src folder is where you will do most of your application development.

Let’s look a little closer at the folders inside src.

1. Console: Contains the console commands and console tasks for your application. For more information see Shells, Tasks & Console Tools.
2. Controller: Contains your application’s controllers and their components.
3. Locale: Stores string files for internationalization.
4. Model: Contains your application’s tables, entities and behaviors.
5. View: Presentational classes are placed here: cells, helpers, and template files.
6. Template: Presentational files are placed here: elements, error pages, layouts, and view template files.

...read more

beforeFilter()

• Table names are plural and lowercased
• model names are singular and CamelCased: ModelName
• model filenames are singular and underscored: model_name.php
• controller names are plural and CamelCased with *Controller* appended: ControllerNamesController
• controller filenames are plural and underscored with *controller* appended: controller_names_controller.php

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By calling ajax helper and then using it in controller for rendering.

1. Can be done on submission in the controller
2. Using javascript/ajax while the user is still filling the data

By adding the javascript files in webroot and call them in default views if needed everywhere or just in the related veiws. Components are packages of logic that are shared between controllers. They are useful when a common logic or code is required between different controllers.

1. Security
2. Sessions
3. ACL(Access control lists)
4. Auth(Authentication)
5. Emails
6. Cookies
7. Request Handling
8. MVC architecture
9. Built-in validations
10. Caching
11. scaffolding

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Helpers in CakePHP are associated with Presentation layers of application. Helpers mainly contain presentational logic which is available to share between many views, elements, or layouts.

• FormHelper
• HtmlHelper
• JsHelper
• CacheHelper
• NumberHelper
• Paginator
• RSS
• SessionHelper
• TextHelper
• TimeHelper

Behaviors in CakePHP are associated with Models. Behaviors are used to change the way models behaves and enforcing model to act as something else. Component is a Controller extension, Helpers are View extensions, Behavior is a Model Extension.

• Component is used to extend a Controller
• Behavior is used to extend a Model
• Helper is used to extend a View

For example:

• A shopping cart Component might offer functionality that can be used and shared across multiple Controllers.
• A custom upload Behavior could be used to extend a Model, for example to add images uploads. Another common example of a Behavior would be to add extra validation functionality beyond that which CakePHP offers by default.
• A Helper can be used to assist with View functionality.

Element in cakephp are smaller and reusable bits of view code. Elements are usually rendered inside views. Layout in cakephp are used to display the views that contain presentational code. In simple views are rendered inside a layout.

The set() method is used for creating a variable in the view file.

For Example, if we write, $this->set('posts',$posts); in controller fie, then the variable $posts will be available to use in the view template file for that action.

The bindModel() and unbindModel() Model methods are used to create and destroy model associations on the fly. The method requestAction is used to call a controller's action from any location and returns data from the action.

The default extension of view files is .ctp

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1. The Security.salt is used for generating hashes. We can change the default Security.salt value in /app/Config/core.php
2. Security.cipherseed is used for encrypt/decrypt strings. We can change the default Security.cipherSeed value by editing /app/Config/core.php.

Scaffolding is a technique that allows a developer to define and create a basic application that can create, retrieve, update and delete objects.

To add scaffolding to your application, just add the $scaffold variable in the controller.

Scaffolding is Automatic CRUD creation, but i suggest not to use it because at any stage you will need to write your own code.

Callback functions are simple functions which called automatically when are defined by the core CakePHP. Suppose you are inserting a record in your database. Now you have two requirements.

1. Validate the data before inserting it into the database.
2. Want to do some changes after inserting them into the database.

Callback Methods

1. beforeFind
2. afterFind
3. beforeValidate
4. afterValidate
5. beforeSave
6. afterSave
7. beforeDelete
8. afterDelete
9. onError

Associations - Linking Tables Together

Associations are the terms which means getting the data from database which are in different tables.

The four association types in CakePHP are: hasOne, hasMany, belongsTo, and belongsToMany.

Relationship	Association Type	Example
one to one	hasOne	A user has one profile.
one to many	hasMany	A user can have multiple articles.
many to one	belongsTo	Many articles belong to a user.
many to many	belongsToMany	Tags belong to many articles.

Associations are defined during the initialize() method of your table object.

For example if we wanted to define a belongsTo association in our ArticlesTable:

If we had the UsersTable and AddressesTable classes made we could make the association with the following code:

For more details Click to read

The learning curve and loads the full application before it starts your task. It's not recommended for small projects because of its resource-heavy structure.

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