CakePHP 2.x: Migrate from 1.3

The CakePHP 1.3 to 2.0 migration guide does probably cover most of what we have found below…but it appears to be written by and for the developers of CakePHP rather than for people who use CakePHP to develop their own applications. So here are some of the things we are doing during our 1.3 to 2.4 migration (although I can’t guarantee that they were all actually necessary), in case they help others. Please note that this is a work in progress 🙂

Upgrade Shell

Upgrade Shell – this promised considerably more than it delivered but did at least rename the controllers and changed the case of some of the folders under app. The rest were corrected using the Folder Names section of the migration guide, including the Views sub-folders and renaming ‘helpers’ to ‘Helper’

Files to copy from 2.x code

Copy the following from your download to the same place in \app:

\app\webroot\index.php
\app\View\Helper\AppHelper.php
\app\Config\core.php (contains a new error handling config. info)
\app\Config\routes.php (contains a couple of new setting to load plgin routes and ‘default’ CakePHP routes.

Update Paginator code

In view:

echo $this->Paginator->counter(array(
    'format' => __('Page %page% of %pages%, showing %current% courses out of %count% total', true)
    ));

changes to:

echo $this->Paginator->counter(
    'Page {:page} of {:pages}, showing {:current} records out of
     {:count} total'
);

In controller, this syntax:

$this->paginate['Event'] = array(
            'order'=>array(
                ..
                ),
             'conditions'=>array(
                ..
                 )
             );

$this->set('events', $this->paginate());

changes to:

$this->paginate = array(
                'order'=>array(
                     ..
                    ),
                 'conditions'=>array(
                    ..
                     )
                 );
$this->set('events', $this->paginate('Event'));

Change all ‘action’ functions in ctp files from:

function index(){}

public function index(){}

Auth Component

Now required to explicitly log users in – not done automagically any more. Where we use WebAuth to authenticate and manually log users in:

if($this->Auth->login($user_id))
     {
     $this->Session->setFlash('Logged in');
     }

becomes:

$this->request->data['User'] = array_merge($this->request->data['User'], array('id' => $user_id));
if($this->Auth->login($this->request->data['User']))
     {
     $this->Session->setFlash('Logged in');
     }

Form2Helper

Although, some of this is specific to the Form2Helper (to make MySQL enum fields show enumerated values rather than a number), some of these points will apply to all helpers:

Change name of helper to Form2Helper.php, instead of Form2.php;
Change App::import(‘Form’) to App::uses(‘FormHelper’, ‘View/Helper’) above class definition (replacement of App::import in 2.x with App::uses)
$this->_introspectModel($modelKey, ‘fields’, $fieldKey) instead of $this->_introspectModel($modelKey) (changes to _introspectModel)
After an hour or two of trying to work out why the first enum input in a form was being output as a standard text box while subsequent inputs for the same field in the db, were coming out correctly as selects, I realised that:
```
isset($this->fieldset[$modelKey])
```
was not returning false when:
```
$this->fieldset[$modelKey]['fields']
```
was returning ‘null’ so I have replaced it with:
```
if (!isset($this->fieldset[$modelKey]['fields'][$fieldKey]))
```
and it’s all working nicely now.

Request Object

Use $this->request->data instead of $this->data

FormHelper

FormHelper::select(string $fieldName, array $options, mixed $selected, array $attributes)

becomes

FormHelper::select(string $fieldName, array $options, array $attributes)

and

$html->link