Customizing Comment Model

For the Comment model, we mainly need to customize the rules() and attributeLabels() methods. The attributeLabels() method returns a mapping between attribute names and attribute labels. We do not need to touch relations() since the code generated by the Gii tool is good enough.

1. Customizing rules() Method ¶

We first customize the validation rules generated by the Gii tool. The following rules are used for comments:

public function rules()
{
    return array(
        array('content, author, email', 'required'),
        array('author, email, url', 'length', 'max'=>128),
        array('email','email'),
        array('url','url'),
    );
}

In the above, we specify that the author, email and content attributes are required; the length of author, email and url cannot exceed 128; the email attribute must be a valid email address; and the url attribute must be a valid URL.

2. Customizing attributeLabels() Method ¶

We then customize the attributeLabels() method to declare the label display for each model attribute. This method returns an array consisting of name-label pairs. When we call CHtml::activeLabel() to display an attribute label.

public function attributeLabels()
{
    return array(
        'id' => 'Id',
        'content' => 'Comment',
        'status' => 'Status',
        'create_time' => 'Create Time',
        'author' => 'Name',
        'email' => 'Email',
        'url' => 'Website',
        'post_id' => 'Post',
    );
}

Tip: If the label for an attribute is not declared in attributeLabels(), an algorithm will be used to generate an appropriate label. For example, a label Create Time will be generated for attributes create_time or createTime.

3. Customizing Saving Process ¶

Because we want to record the creation time of a comment, we override the beforeSave() method of Comment like we do for the Post model:

protected function beforeSave()
{
    if(parent::beforeSave())
    {
        if($this->isNewRecord)
            $this->create_time=time();
        return true;
    }
    else
        return false;
}