Yii 1.1 General purpose web service for crud operations - php

Question

Using Yii 1.1, I consider creating a soap based web service which performs common CRUD operations on models. For example I just want to make a single CreateObject function for all models which receives some parameters, finds the model on the fly and assigns those parameters to appropriate model attributes.
for example for User model I've created the following action in my web service controller:
/** Create a new User record
* #param string username
* #param string password
* #param string family
* #param string name
* #param string title
* #param string email
* #param string mobile
* #return mixed true on success or an array of validation errors on failure
* #soap
*/
public function createUser($username, $password, $family, $name="", $title="", $email="",$mobile="")
{
$newUser = new User();
$newUser->username = $username;
$newUser->password = $password;
$newUser->family = $family;
$newUser->name = $name;
$newUser->title = $title;
$newUser->email = $email;
$newUser->mobile = $mobile;
//Get user roles
/* if (is_array($roles) && !empty($roles)) {
$roleList = User::getRoleList();
$newUser->_roles = array_intersect($roles, $roleList);
} else $newUser->_roles = array();*/
if($newUser->save())
return true;
else
return $newUser->getErrors();
}
This function is called via a web service to create a new user and it works fine. However I have to do the same thing to create a new object from the rest of models.
I have heard about entity pattern or entity factory which may help me to archive this goal but I've not found any good tutorial about that.
Any suggestion is highly appreciated.

Answer 1

Using interfaces or inheritance with SOAP is quite tricky, so an easier aproach would be to modify your SOAP web service so that it will receive two strings, one for the name of the model and the other a json string with the attributes for your model, so you can instanciate your model in the following way:
public function create($model,$attributes){
$model=new $modelName;
}
Also you can use the php json functions to decode the attributes encoded as a json object.
UPDATE
If you need some complex logic for the initialization of your models, you could try using either a factory method or a Factory class. A really simple example could be something like this:
class ModelsFactory{
//use constants to identify the classes that you can return
const Model1=1;
const Model2=2;
public static getInstance($model){
$modelInstance=null;
switch($model){
case Model1:
//... initialize a model1 class and asign to $modelInstance
case Model2:
//...
}
return $modelInstance;
}
}
As you can see you could initialize complex classes in an easy way. Also you can extend it to your needs. Also if you need parameters just add them to the creator method in the form of an object or as an associative array.
Hope this helps!