ecne-framework

MVC & ORM PHP Framework

Ecne - Documentation

Ecne Framework

• Installation
  • Install Framework
  • Install Dependencies
• Controllers
  • Default Controllers
  • Creating a Controller
  • Defining Actions

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Installation

The Ecne-Framework is avaiable on GitHub. Once you download the zip folder, extract it contents and copy all files and folders inside the ecne-framework folder into your project's root folder.

Install Framework

Once you have downloaded Ecne to your project folder you should have a file structure like:

• Project Root
  • app
    • controllers
    • core
    • libraries
    • models
    • views
  • public
    • res
  • assets

Inside app is all the core functionality for this Model View Controller framework. We store the controllers inside the controllers folder. The controllers will be responsible for loading the correct view depending on where in your website a user goes. It will also be responsible for loading in models which store the dynamic data for the webpage, and serve it to the view to be rendered in webpage.

Install Dependencies

With the command prompt still open, change the directory to the root directory of the ecne_framework folder. You will see a file name composer.json, this contains all the dependencies that Ecne is dependent upon and must be installed in order for Ecne to function. With the command prompt open and in the root folder of the ecne_framework folder, run the following command:
composer install

This command will install all dependecies in a vendor folder and create an autload file to be use in your project. This has already been defined in the index.php file in the root of ecne_framework directory. include_once BASE_PATH . '/vendor/autoload.php';

Controllers

Controllers are responsible for the transfer of model data to the view. Controllers contain actions, which are basically routes that controller can load. For example, if you had a Controller User, you could have multiple actions associated with that control that relate to a user account. Actions may include, login, logout, register, settings. Here is an example Controller class:

namespace Ecne\Controller;

class NewController extends Controller
{
   public function action()
   {
         ... perform action ...
   }
}

You can now type www.yourwebsite.com/newcontroller/action into your browser and the code above will run.

Default Controllers

By default, when you download the Ecne Framework, it comes with two default controllers. Index, and Error. The index controller handles actions for the index of your website, like landing page, contact, about, pages. Error will load every time a user tries to navigate to a controller that has never been created. If a user attempts to call an action that doesn't exist but the controller does, the controllers index action is called by default.

Creating a Controller

To create a controller, you need to create a controller class inside the app/controller folder. You must append the word Controller to the end of all filenames for controllers. For example, if you wanted to create a controller for a person. You would create the controller under the controllers folder, name it PersonController to be loaded when your browser points to http://yourwebsite/person/.

Controllers must reside inside the Ecne\Controller namespace and must extend the base Controller` class.

namespace Ecne\Controller;

class PersonController extends Controller
{
   ...
}

Defining Actions

To define actions for a controller you just create methods in the controller class with the names of the actions you wish to run. If you wanted a logout action in the Person Controller, you would create a method called logout in the PersonController.

namespace Ecne\Controller;

class PersonController extends Controller
{
   public function logout()
   {
         ... log user out ...
   }
}

Views

Views consist of your design code, this includes html, css, javascript, jquery, etc... Your controller will generate data from your models, that you will use to update the view.

Create a View

All views needs to be stored in the views folder in projectroot/app/views. When storing views associated with controllers, it is best to store each individual controllers views in separate folders. For example, you may have two controllers called User and Blog.

In the UserController you could have two actions home & logout. When the user goes to http://yourdomain.com/user/home the design code in the file app/views/user/home.php will be rendered to the webpage. In the BlogController you might have two actions called view & create. When a user navigates to http://yourdomain.com/blog/view the design code inside app/view/blog/view.php will be render and display a blog post to the user.

Calling Views

Following the recommendations of the previous step for creating views, makes calling a view from a controller pretty straight forward.

Within a controller, inside the action the render method on our View object is what will call our view. This method requires two parameters. $view - the location of our view. You just need to reference the folder and file, the Ecne Framework is aware of the views location so you don't need to give the full path. For example, because our view is called home.php inside the person folder, we only need to supply person/home. You don't need to supply the .php extension either. The second parameter is an array containing all the variables you will load in your view. This view does not completely remove the need for PHP blocks, but does help in cutting down the amount of PHP present in design code and helps maintain need design code.

This will render the html stored in the home.php file store in /person/home.php

namespace Ecne\Controller;

class PersonController extends Controller
{
    public function home()
    {
        $this->view->render('person/home', array(
            'username'='batman'
        ));
    }
}