Saying Hello

In this section, we will describe how to create a new page displaying "Hello" in your application. To achieve this goal, you will create an action as well as a view:

• The application will dispatch the page request to the action;
• And the action will in turn render the view that shows "Hello" to the end user.

Through this tutorial, you will learn

• How to create an action to respond to requests;
• How to create a view to compose response content;
• How an application dispatches requests to actions.

Creating an Action

For the "Hello" task, you will create a say action which reads a message parameter from a request and displays the message back to the user. If the request does not provide a message parameter, the action will display the default "Hello".

Info: Actions are the objects that end users can directly refer to for execution. Actions are grouped by controllers. The execution result of an action is the response that an end user will receive.

Actions must be declared in controllers. For simplicity, you may declare the say action in the existing controller SiteController which is defined in the class file controllers/SiteController.php:

<?php

namespace app\controllers;

use yii\web\Controller;

class SiteController extends Controller
{
    // ...existing code...

    public function actionSay($message = 'Hello')
    {
        return $this->render('say', ['message' => $message]);
    }
}

In the above code, the say action is defined as a method named actionSay in SiteController. Yii uses the prefix action to differentiate action methods from non-action methods in a controller class. The name after the action prefix is treated as the ID of the corresponding action.

Info: Action IDs are in lower case. If an action ID has multiple words, they should be concatenated by dashes, e.g., create-comment. Action method names are derived from action IDs by removing dashes from the IDs, turning the first letter in each word into upper case, and prefixing them with action. For example, the action ID create-comment corresponds to the action method name actionCreateComment.

The action method takes a parameter $message which defaults to "Hello". When the application receives a request and determines that the say action is responsible for handling the request, it will populate this parameter with the same named parameter found in the request.

Within the action method, [[yii\web\Controller::render()|render()]] is called to render a view named say. The message parameter is also passed to the view so that it can be echoed there. The rendering result is returned by the action method, which will be taken by the application and displayed to the end user.

Creating a View

Views are scripts that you write to compose response content. For the "Hello" task, you will create a say view to echo the message parameter received from the action method:

<?php
use yii\helpers\Html;
?>
<?= Html::encode($message) ?>

The say view should be saved in the file views/site/say.php. When the method [[yii\web\Controller::render()|render()]] is called in an action, it will look for a PHP file named as views/ControllerID/ActionID/ViewName.php.

Note that in the above code, the message parameter is [[yii\helpers\Html::encode()|HTML-encoded]] before being echoed. This is necessary because the parameter comes from end users who may attempt cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks by embedding malicious JavaScript code in the parameter.

You may put more content in the say view. They can be HTML tags, plain text, or even PHP statements. In fact, the say view is just a PHP script which is executed by the [[yii\web\Controller::render()|render()]] method. The content echoed by the view script will be forwarded by the application as the response to the end user.

Trying it Out

After creating the action and the view, you may access the new page by the following URL:

http://hostname/index.php?r=site/say&message=Hello+World

This will show a page displaying "Hello World". The page shares the same header and footer as other pages of the application. If you omit the message parameter in the URL, you would see the page displays "Hello". This is because message is passed as a parameter to the actionSay() method, and when it is omitted, the default value of "Hello" will come into play.

Info: The new page shares the same header and footer as other pages because the [[yii\web\Controller::render()|render()]] method will automatically embed the result of the say view in a so-called layout views/layouts/main.php.

The r parameter requires more explanation. It stands for route which is a globally unique ID referring to an action. Its format is ControllerID/ActionID. When the application receives a request, it will check this parameter and use the ControllerID part to determine which controller class should be instantiated to handle the request. Then, the controller will use the ActionID part to determine which action should be instantiated to do the real work. In our case, the route site/say will be resolved into the SiteController controller class and the say action. As a result, the SiteController::actionSay() method will be called to handle the request.

Info: Like actions, controllers also have IDs that uniquely identify them in an application. Controller IDs use the same naming rules as action IDs. Controller class names are derived from controller IDs by removing dashes from the IDs, turning the first letter in each word into upper case, and suffixing them with the word Controller. For example, the controller ID post-comment corresponds to the controller class name PostCommentController.

Summary

In this section, you have touched the controller part and the view part in the MVC design pattern. You created an action as part of a controller to handle requests. And you also created a view to compose response content. There is no model involved because the only data used is the simple message parameter.

You have also learned the route concept which is the bridge between user requests and controller actions.

In the next section, you will learn how to create a model and add a new page with an HTML form.