milesjohnson

So I never worked much with named parameters before in CakePHP, but recently I needed a way to filter data. It seemed passing many arguments to the action wasn't the best or correct approach. My initial thought was to find a method that can easily grab the param, but after much searching and looking at the API and Cookbook, no such method exists. The next alternative was doing a long ugly shorthand if statement that looked something like this (assuming our param and URL is /search/filter:username/):

$filter = (isset($this->params['named']['filter'])) ? $this->params['named']['filter'] : '';

Now seeing that CakePHP is in 1.2 Stable, you would assume they would have a simple method to fix this. But no worries, I have created a method that is very easy to use and add to your application. To add it to your application, you would place it in your AppController file.

/**
 * Used to get the value of a named param
 * @param mixed $var
 * @param mixed $default
 * @return mixed
 */
function getNamedParam($var, $default = '') {
	return (isset($this->params['named'][$var])) ? $this->params['named'][$var] : $default;
}

The first argument $var would be the name of the param (E.G., "filter" in our example above) and the second argument $default is the value you can return if the param does not exist. To use the method, simply call it from anywhere in your controller like so:

$filter = $this->getNamedParam('filter');

I have also created a second method for grabbing the value of query string param (Example URL: /search/?filter=username). I hope this has been helpful to someone, it has certainly been helpful and easily readable to me.

/**
 * Used to get the value of a get query
 * @param mixed $var
 * @param mixed $default
 * @return mixed
 */
function getQueryParam($var, $default = '') {
	return (isset($this->params['url'][$var])) ? $this->params['url'][$var] : $default;
}