Chapter 2 [ 53 ] Other potential modulespotential modules modules We could of course have many more objects managed with our registry; if we wished to further extend our framework in the future, this could include: E-mail parsing Security management Filesystem management Let's have a brief look at what would be involved in such objects, and potential uses for them. Email parsing With an e-mail parsing object, we could easily process incoming e-mails. This could be useful for: Running an online help desk: We could process incoming e-mails, and log them as support tickets, even assign them to different categories or departments depending on the e-mail address the e-mails were sent to. Running a basic online e-mail service for our customers. Security management By providing a security management object within our registry, we could make it easier to: Manage a ban list of: E-mail addresses Usernames IP addresses (to prevent troublesome users registering, and make it easy to block automated spam bots) Validate certain forms of data, including: E-mail addresses Phone numbers Prices Postal codes and zip codes • • • • • • ° ° ° • ° ° ° ° This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Planning our Framework [ 54 ] Filesystem management Filesystem access could also be abstracted, making it easier for us to: Create les and folders on the server Manage permissions of les Process uploaded les Delete les Display le and directory listings This would be useful if we wish to add functions to make it easier to manage le uploads; for instance when we integrate the provisions for allowing customers to upload les with certain products (for example a photograph to be printed onto a t-shirt they order), we could use this to easily manage the uploads, place the uploads into monthly or weekly folders, and keep things easily organized. Routing requests We now have our core tasks managed within a single instance of a registry, which is available to the rest of the framework. These core tasks are generally required for each area of the site. We also have a structure in place allowing different code to be run, such as for a product to be displayed, an order to be placed, or a page to be viewed. While this additional code is easy to slot in, we still require a way for the framework to know when that code should be run, based on the URL our users are visiting. The simplest way to route requests is to rst search for any pages in the database that have a search engine-friendly reference that matches the incoming URL. If no match is found, we call the controller, which matches the rst part of the URL, and have it determine the correct action to take based on the rest of the URL. For example, products/view/some-product would tell the products controller to "view" the product with the reference "some product". This isn't the most exible method, as we may want requests of certain formats to be sent to different models, or be handled in a different way; however, it is the quickest and easiest method. One way to extend this is with a router. An alternative: With a router An alternative approach is to use a router. The router matches the pattern of the URL of the visitor to the website and routes the request depending on the format, or against a series of rules which are dened as routes. • • • • • This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Chapter 2 [ 55 ] Try it yourself Why not try and integrate a router into the framework yourself? Processing the incoming URL within our the incoming URL within our registry object A single function allows us to easily process the current URL and breaks it down to make it easy for us to route the request to the correct part of the framework. This function works by taking the URL path from the page GET variable (for example, ?page=products/view/some-product). The framework is set to process everything between forward slashes as a different part of the URL. The rst section, for example products, indicates which controller to use. Generally the controller will take the second part, say view, to determine what it needs to do, and how it should use data from the model, and often the third part as an indication as to the data the model should represent. /** * Gets data from the current URL * @return void */ public function getURLData() { $urldata = $_GET['page']; self::$urlPath = $urldata; if( $urldata == '' ) { $this->urlBits[] = 'home'; } else { We split the URL data at each instance of a forward slash with the explode function. $data = explode( '/', $urldata ); while ( !empty( $data ) && strlen( reset( $data ) ) === 0 ) { array_shift( $data ); } while ( !empty( $data ) && strlen( end( $data ) ) === 0) { array_pop($data); This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Planning our Framework [ 56 ] } self::$urlBits = $this->array_trim( $data ); } } Two variables are required to store the URL and the bits of the URL as an array. Two additional functions are also required, to return the URL and the bits of the URL. index.php Our index.php le needs to load up our registry, connect to the database, call the authentication checks, process the URL, and pass control to the appropriate controller—which is quite a lot of work. Most of the actual work is done by the registry and the registry objects we have already created. The rst stage is to load the registry and its objects. Once this is done, we can connect to the database, and then we can perform our authentication checks. Before any code is written, we should start our sessions; this can't be done after anything has been outputted to the user, so it's best to do it before any other code to make sure this is the case. // first and foremost, start our sessions session_start(); // setup some definitions // The applications root path, so we can easily get this path from files located in other folders define( "FRAMEWORK_PATH", dirname( __FILE__ ) ."/" ); // require our registry require_once('registry/registry.class.php'); $registry = PHPEcommerceFrameworkRegistry::singleton(); $registry->getURLData(); // store core objects in the registry. $registry->storeObject('mysql.database', 'db'); $registry->storeObject('template', 'template'); $registry->storeObject('authentication', 'authenticate'); // database settings include(FRAMEWORK_PATH . 'config.php'); // create a database connection $registry->getObject('db')->newConnection($configs['db_host_ ecomframe'], $configs['db_user_ecomframe'], $configs['db_pass_ ecomframe'], $configs['db_name_ecomframe']); // process any authentication $registry->getObject('authenticate')->checkForAuthentication(); This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Chapter 2 [ 57 ] Next we need to load a list of controllers our framework has (we should maintain a database table of these). Once the registry object has parsed the URL the user is accessing the site with, we can check the rst part of this against our controller list, and pass control to the relevant one. // populate our page object from a template file $registry->getObject('template')-> buildFromTemplates('header.tpl.php', 'main.tpl.php', 'footer.tpl.php'); $activeControllers = array(); $registry->getObject('db')->executeQuery('SELECT controller FROM controllers WHERE active=1'); while( $activeController = $registry->getObject('db')->getRows() ) { $activeControllers[] = $activeController['controller']; } $currentController = $registry->getURLBit( 0 ); if( in_array( $currentController, $activeControllers ) ) { require_once( FRAMEWORK_PATH . 'controllers/' . $currentController . '/controller.php'); $controllerInc = $currentController.'controller'; $controller = new $controllerInc( $registry, true ); } else { require_once( FRAMEWORK_PATH . 'controllers/page/controller.php'); $controller = new Pagecontroller( $registry, true ); } // parse it all, and spit it out $registry->getObject('template')->parseOutput(); print $registry->getObject('template')->getPage()->getContent(); exit(); This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 . and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Chapter 2 [ 55 ] Try it yourself Why not try and integrate a router into the framework. file $registry->getObject('template')-> buildFromTemplates('header.tpl .php& apos;, 'main.tpl .php& apos;, 'footer.tpl .php& apos;); $activeControllers = array(); $registry->getObject('db')->executeQuery('SELECT. licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Planning our Framework [ 56 ] } self::$urlBits = $this->array_trim( $data ); } } Two