Yii Captcha Action change colors randomly - php

Question

I decided to make Yii captcha render random colors for background and foreground, so I had made the following change to the public method actions in the SiteController where the captcha is going to be rendered in the actionContcat view.
class SiteController extends Controller
{
/**
* Declares class-based actions.
*/
public function actions()
{
return array(
// captcha action renders the CAPTCHA image displayed on the contact page
'captcha'=>array(
'class'=>'CCaptchaAction',
'backColor'=>$this->setRandColor('DARK'),
'foreColor'=>$this->setRandColor('LIGHT'),
),
// page action renders "static" pages stored under 'protected/views/site/pages'
// They can be accessed via: index.php?r=site/page&view=FileName
'page'=>array(
'class'=>'CViewAction',
),
);
}
...
In the code above I have make the backColor and foreColor keys values are the return of a private method setRandColor. The following is the method code:
/**
* Generate random hexadecimal color code in format 0xXXXXXX according to type param
* which has only two values DARK and LIGHT
* #param string $type
*/
private function setRandColor($type='DARK')
{
$color = '0x';
$darks = array(0,1,3,4,5,6,7);
$lights = array(9,'A','B','C','D','E','F');
if ($type == 'DARK')
{
$chooseFrom = $darks;
}
else
{
$chooseFrom = $lights;
}
for ($i = 0; $i < 6; $i++)
{
$color .= $chooseFrom[array_rand($chooseFrom)];
}
return $color;
}
I have tested setRandColor alone. i.e in plain php script and I found it works fine to return the hexadecimal code. Look at the following Demo: http://codepad.viper-7.com/OcCSjL
However, when using the described code above I just get a black captcha image with no any error messages. I need to know why this code do not work in my Yii application?

Answer 1

I have just found the problem. The problem is the type of the returned value from setRandColor method. The method returns string value, while the captcha array requires hexadecimal value.
I solved this issue by modifying the last line of setRandColor in which it returns the value as follows:
return $color/1;
By this way I casted the type from string to be number.