Write less code: merge Save and Edit in CakePHP

In most cases writing less code gives the developer a series of advantages: it’s easier to maintain and extend, easier to read and easier to debug! In this post I’m going to suggest a little CakePHP tip that in the long run will save you a lot of coding.
Some develepers already implement this method, but I think it deserves much wider usage: I’m talking about merging model save and edit in a single controller method.

CakePHP needs very little code to save a record to the database. Models are able to automatically detect the type of query to build (INSERT vs UPDATE) based on the type of data passed to the save() method. The difference is that when creating a new row you will not pass a record ID, which is required to UPDATE. So, using CakePHP it’s really easy to implement a unique method to do both things. Here is the controller code.

public function save($id = null) {

    // check if the form has been posted

    if ($this->request->is('post')) {

        // try to validate and save

        if ($this->Model->save($this->request->data)) {

            $this->Session->setFlash('Model Saved!');

            $this->redirect('/models/index');

        }

    }

 

    // if an id has been passed, send record data to the view

    if ($id) {

        $this->set('model', $this->Model->findById($id));

    }

}

 

Of course you will also merge the view files, and that’s cool when you’re managing a lot of fields. Just remember to supply the ID field (it won’t be displayed to the user), so Cake knows when you are performing an UPDATE query.

 

echo $this->Form->input('id');

 

This is today’s tip, I hope it will help you write better code!