Scenario ¶

More or less I use auto-complete field for a form. CJuiAutoComplete is a yii widget for this purposes. The common use case is to make an ajax request and retrieve a list from the database. So in this case you have to write a controller action to return you a json encoded list. What if I had a generic action to do this work for me?

Implementation ¶

This is a class that extends CAction to do the work for me.

<?php
class EAutoCompleteAction extends CAction
{
    public $model;
    public $attribute;
    private $results = array();

    public function run()
    {
        if(isset($this->model) && isset($this->attribute)) {
            $criteria = new CDbCriteria();
            $criteria->compare($this->attribute, $_GET['term'], true);
            $model = new $this->model;
            foreach($model->findAll($criteria) as $m)
            {
                $this->results[] = $m->{$this->attribute};
            }
                
        }
        echo CJSON::encode($this->results);
    }
}
?>

Simple as that. I have placed this action in my extension folder like:

./webapp/protected/extensions/EAutoCompleteAction.php

Use ¶

And in my controller I declare this action in the public actions function:

Declare action in controller ¶

class MyController extends CController
{
  ...
  public function actions()
  {
    return array(
      'aclist'=>array(
        'class'=>'application.extensions.EAutoCompleteAction',
        'model'=>'My', //My model's class name
        'attribute'=>'my_name', //The attribute of the model i will search
      ),
    );
  }
  ...
}

Use in CJuiAutoComplete widget ¶

So i have a form view like: ~~~ ./webapp/protected/views/my/_form.php ~~~ I initialize my widget there like.

<?php 
  $this->widget('zii.widgets.jui.CJuiAutoComplete', array(
      'attribute'=>'my_name',
        'model'=>$model,
        'sourceUrl'=>array('my/aclist'),
        'options'=>array(
          'minLength'=>'3',
        ),
        'htmlOptions'=>array(
          'size'=>45,
          'maxlength'=>45,
        ),
  )); ?>

And I am done. Now I can use this CAction in whatever Controller I want for whatever model I want and get quick results.