Usually most of my tables contain a column named status to classify the record as “active”, “inactive” or “spam”, just to mention a few possibilities.
In the admin panels of my applications I use images to represent the status. By the time i got irritated with putting a few lines of code, which determines which image to display, to every table with a status-column so I decided to code my first helper quickly.

It uses CakePHP’s html helper to generate the image-code and works for boolean values (1, 0) as well as for “active”, “inactive”, “pending”, “spam” and “deleted”.
If these values are not enough it is easily extendable for other requirements.

<?php

class StatusHelper extends AppHelper {
var $helpers = array(‘Html’);

function display($status) {
$img = array();
switch($status) {
case ‘active’:
case 1:
$img['url'] = ‘ok.png’;
$img['alt'] = ‘Active’;
break;

case ‘inactive’:
case 0:
$img['url'] = ‘error.png’;
$img['alt'] = ‘Inactive’;
break;

case ‘pending’:
$img['url'] = ‘pending.png’;
$img['alt'] = ‘Pending’;
break;

case ‘spam’:
$img['url'] = ‘spam.png’;
$img['alt'] = ‘Spam’;
break;

case ‘deleted’:
$img['url'] = ‘delete.png’;
$img['alt'] = ‘Deleted’;
break;
}

return $this->Html->image(
‘/img/icons/small/’ . $img['url'],
array(‘alt’ => $img['alt'], ‘title’ => $img['alt'])
);
}
}

?>

It is very easy to use (don’t forget to add “Status” to your controller’s helper-array):

<?php echo $status->display($user['User']['status']);  ?>

I use icons from the free HumanO2 Iconset by schollidesign:

Let me know if you have any suggestions.

candyman

Recently I faced the problem of translating a website into different languages. It works like a charm using CakePHP’s __() function though it does not work offhand for validation messages in the model because you can’t call a function outside a method in a class (the modelclass in this case):

<?php
class MyModel extends AppModel {
var $name = ‘MyModel’;

// This won’t work!
var $validate = array(
‘username’ => array(‘rule’ => ‘notempty’, ‘message’ => __(‘error1′, true))
);

?>

After some investigation I found out that setting the validation variable in the Models constructor should help. Indeed, it did work – but the problem is that the Models are interpreted quite early – before the AppControllers beforeFilter is executed at least. So, for example, if you set the language to a user-defined value in beforeFilter, the validation messges will still remain in the standard language (determined by i18n I think). I looked up the models callback possibilities and found what I was looking for: beforeValidate.

Defining the validation variable in the beforeValidate method also solves the above mentioned problem:

<?php
class YourModel extends AppModel {
var $name = ‘YourModel’;

function __construct($id = false, $table = null, $ds = null) {
parent::__construct($id, $table, $ds);

$this->validate = array(
‘email’ => array(
‘unique’ => array(
‘rule’ => ‘isUnique’,
‘message’ => __(‘Another user is using this e-mail address.’, true)
)
)
);
}
?>

Using this piece of code allows you to set the language to a pre- or user-defined value combined with translated error-messages for Cake’s built-in data validation.

Please let me know if you have better ways (I guess there are, maybe in CakePHP 1.3) to solve it or in case you find my solution helpful.