Create a dashboard in Yii Framework - php

Question

I am newbie to yii. I am doing a small application in Yii.
Lets suppose I have some tables like product, sales, discount, customer,
Now I have done all the Models and Controllers(crud) for these tables. Now when admin wants to enter one new product then he is typing
http://localhost/application/index.php?r=product
. In the same way he has to enter discount to go discount section. Now I want to render all the modules in one application just like dashboard. Where admin can directly make change what he wants from that single page. So can someone kindly tell me how to solve this issue. Any help and suggestions will be really appreciable.
EDIT
I have gone through some links but I did not found any documentation there.

Answer 1

First of all you should think of what should be presented on dashboard, you have choosen some entities already. From that entities there might be different criteria for showing items:
One will show latest products
Other will show last edited posts by user
And maybe sales will show highest sales?
Now, you should choose whenever to allow some actions on theese items.
For product you could have some (sample) quick buttons/link: publish, update
For customer there could be orders
Now, to acomplish this, you would have to define several dataproviders, setup several listviews, and put all that into your DashboardController. No! From Yii conventions, and MVC generally, there should be: fat model, this controller, and wise view.
Taking above into account, you should create widget for each type of data. Widget should be "independent", this will be like "model" for your dashboard. Should contain all logic required for type of entity, and should not require any configuration (for autocreation too).
For dashboard widget you should also create some base class for this purpose, so dashboard widget will look consistently: to have some layout.
A good start for this purpose is CPortLet - this already defines somethink like dashboard widget, with title, and div around it's content.
Here is some example to start with portlets:
class ProductDashboard extends CPortlet // Or intermediate class, ie. DashboardItem
{
protected $_products = array();
public function init()
{
$this->_products = new CActiveDataProvider('Product', array(
'criteria'=>array(
'with'=>array('...'),
'order'=>'t.sort_order ASC',
'condition'=>'...',
'together'=>true,
),
));;
$this->title= 'Newset producs';
parent::init();
}
protected function renderContent()
{
$this->render('productDashboard');
}
}
In portlet view, views/productDashboard.php just place listview:
$this->widget('zii.widgets.CListView', array(
'dataProvider'=>$dataProvider,
'itemView'=>'_productView',
'enablePagination'=>true,
));
In _productView place anything about product:
<h4><?= CHtml::encode($data->name); ?></h4>
<p><?= CHtml::encode($data->description); ?></p>
<p>
<?= CHtml::link('Update', array('/product/update', 'id' => $data->id)); ?>
<?= CHtml::link('View', array('/product/view', 'id' => $data->id)); ?>
... More actions ...
</p>
Finally in your dashboard index view place those portlets:
$this->widget('path.to.ProductDashboard');
$this->widget('path.to.SalesDashboard');
....
Or in some automated way:
// Possibly user defined only etc.
$widgets = array('ProductDashboard', 'SalesDashboard', ...);
foreach($widgets as $name)
$this->widget($name)

Answer 2

First, lets take a look on this. Uh, almost 200 pages, but let me leave it here and refer to it in the following answer.
So, we want a page that can manage edit/delete/update actions with the table, and Yii can help you with it in 2 ways:
1st Is for lazy codders, or a guys who just start to work with framework. Just go to the documentation and find out the 1.6 Creating First Yii Application. This article will helps you to set up the basic configurations with demo models/views/controllers to play with it. The result of this Demo Installation is like your dashboard required with more features to explore
2nd step require a lot of code to show up here, and it will be just an instruction how to build everything step-by-step that you can do in the 1st step automatically with Yii. Just ask if you'd like to know about it more.
Cheers!

Answer 3

It sounds like you want to implement a menu. Assuming that you have at least gone through the Creating First Yii Application mentioned by Ignat B., you can read the CMenu class documentation to learn about them, and your modifications would go in the layout.php file in protected\views.

Answer 4

If its a list of menu that you are looking for, you might try this extension: http://www.yiiframework.com/extension/emetrotile
All you need to do is follow the instructions in the source then call it where you want it to load similar to the one below:
$this->widget('ext.emetrotile.EMetroTile', array(
'Tiles'=>array(
array('title'=>'Test Title', 'tiles'=>array(
array('content'=>array('test1-a','test1-b'), 'liveTileOptions'=>array('data-speed'=>750, 'data-delay'=>3000,'data-stack'=>true)),
array('content'=>'test2', 'position'=>'bottom'),
array('content'=>'test4', 'position'=>'bottom'),
array('content'=>'Blog', 'style'=>'vertical', 'url'=>'http://blog.expressthisout.com'),
array('content'=>'test3', 'style'=>'horizontal'),
array('content'=>'test5', 'position'=>'bottom'),
array('content'=>'test6', 'position'=>'top'),
))
)
));

Answer 5

As Syakur Rahman says, emetrotile is a good extension for creating a dashboard. I've created a nice 3 x 2 menu with it, with an image on the front of each, text on the back, and they flip in a sequence one after the other. It has a very cool effect, but it does have a Windows feel to it.
Drew Green wrote the original js seems to be improving it all the time, See http://www.drewgreenwell.com/projects/metrojs