CakePHP Tags Model - php

Question

I have a simple app that has Posts and Tags.
A post can have multiple tags and tags can belong to multiple posts. The basic DB schema is like this:
post table:
id
title
slug
content
tag table:
id
title
slug
tag_posts table:
id
tag_id
post_id
So when a user saves a post it will take a list of tags in a field and then first check if the tags exist. If the tag doesn't exist, then create them, or if not get there existing ids. (all tags are lower-cased so you can't have Tag and tag). The tags are then linked to the post by adding the ids into the tag_posts table.
This works so far, but the code to do it is really horrible. I have the following method in the Tag model which takes the list of tags and does the above:
public function savePostTags($postId, $tags)
{
// Explode the topics by comma, so we have an array to run through
$tags = explode(',', $tags);
// Array for collecting all the data
$collection = array();
//debug($tags);
function is_array_empty( $mixed ) {
if ( is_array($mixed) ) {
foreach ($mixed as $value) {
if ( ! is_array_empty($value) ) {
return false;
}
}
} elseif ( ! empty($mixed) ) {
return false;
}
return true;
}
if(is_array_empty($tags) ) {
return false;
}
// First of all we bin off existing associations to make sure we don't duplicate
// NOTE: The false means don't delete the topics or posts related!!! VERY IMPORTANT!
$this->TagPost->deleteAll(array('TagPost.post_id' => $postId), false);
$tags = array_unique($tags);
// Make sure all tags are unique
foreach($tags as $tag)
{
// Trim it so remove unwanted white spaces in the beginning and the end.
$tag = trim($tag);
// If tag is empty exit here
if(empty($tag) ) {
return false;
}
// Make it all lowercase for consistency of tag names
$tag = strtolower($tag);
// Check if we already have a topic like this
$controlFind = $this->find(
'first',
array(
'conditions' => array(
'title' => $tag
)
)
);
//debug($controlFind);
// No record found (create new tag and link it up)
if(!$controlFind)
{
$this->create();
if(
!$this->save(
array(
'title' => $tag,
'slug' => Inflector::slug($tag)
)
)
)
{
// If only one saving fails we stop the whole loop and method.
return false;
}
else
{
$temp = array(
'TagPost' => array(
'tag_id' => $this->id,
'post_id' => $postId
)
);
}
}
else // Or if found link it with the post
{
$temp = array(
'TagPost' => array(
'tag_id' => $controlFind['Tag']['id'],
'post_id' => $postId
)
);
}
$collection[] = $temp;
}
return $this->TagPost->saveAll($collection, array('validate' => false));
}
Any ideas on how to refactor this?
As it feels really long-winded and seems to break the conventions of CakePHP.

Answer 1

Try this
public function savePostTags($postId, $tags)
{
$tags = explode(',', $tags);
foreach($tags as $key=>$value){
$listTags[$key] = trim(strtolower($value));
}
# find the list of existing tags
$listOfExistingTags = $this->find('list',
array('conditions' => array('title' => $tags),
'recursive' => -1));
$newTags = array_diff($tags, $listOfExistingTags);
#save new tags
foreach($newTags as $key=>$value){
$saveData[$key]['Tag']['title'] = $value;
$saveData[$key]['Tag']['slug'] = Inflector::slug($value);
}
if(!empty($saveData))$this->saveAll($saveData);
# this save all the tags
# now save data in tag_posts
$listOfExistingTags = $this->find('list',
array('conditions' =>array('title' => $tags),
'fields'=>array('id','title'),
'recursive' => -1));
$i = 0;
foreach($listOfExistingTags as $key=>$value){
$tagPostData[$i]['TagPost']['tag_id'] = $key;
$tagPostData[$i]['TagPost']['post_id'] = $postId; $i++;
}
if(!empty($tagPostData)){
App::import('model','TagPost');
$TagPost = new TagPost();
$TagPost->saveAll($tagPostData);
}
}

Answer 2

Any ideas on how to refactor this?
Use the CakeDC Tags plugin. It is unit tested and easy to throw in, takes ~15mins. See it's readme.md. Its basically just adding the behavior and adding a field "tags" to your form.