Adding a comment to an article in CakePHP

Question

I'm learning CakePHP, my first MVC, and I have a few "best practice" questions.

This is my view for displaying a news article:

<h1><?php echo h($post['Post']['title'])?></h1>
<p><?php echo h($post['Post']['body'])?></p>

<?php foreach ($post['Comment'] as $comment): ?>
<div class="comment" style="margin-left:50px;">
        <p><?php echo h($comment['body'])?></p>
    </div>
<?php endforeach;

echo $this->element('newcomment', array("post_id" => $post['Post']['id']));?>

I didn't think you could use the "add" view for adding a comment in another view, so I created an element. I hope that's best practice for this one.

My main "problem" was: adding a comment. Do I add a hidden field to the form, or do I add it to the form's action?

I went with the "id in action" part, because it's easier to reuse it for a redirect afterwards. This is the newcomment element:

<h1>Add Comment</h1>
<?php
echo $this->Form->create('Comment',array('action' => 'add',
                                             'url' => array($post_id)));
echo $this->Form->input('body', array('rows' => '3'));
echo $this->Form->end('Add comment');
?>

And then this is the "add" function in the CommentsController:

public function add($post_id = null) {
    if ($this->request->is('post')) {
        $this->Comment->set(array('post_id'=>$post_id));
        if ($this->Comment->save($this->request->data)) {
            $this->Session->setFlash('Your comment has been added.');
            //$this->redirect(array('action' => 'index'));
            $this->redirect(array('controller' => 'posts', 'action' => 'view', $post_id));
        } else {
            $this->Session->setFlash('Unable to add your comment.');
        }
    }
}

Is that how it should be?

I hope it's OK to ask these kinds of questions here. Using the best practice is pretty important to me.

Answer 1

Looking at your question as an overview of concept, and not line-by-line, there's no problem with this general structure/way of doing it.

We usually have a "comments" element that has everything in it - comments, new comment box...etc. Then, you can pass a variable if you don't want users to be able to comment on that particular thing, or a variable for how many comments you want to show...etc. That doesn't mean it's any better - just works best for us. Each site may present different scenarios which make doing it a different way better.

I've tried asking the "best practice" question for a lot of things (including CakePHP), and what I've found is, there is usually no straight answer. If your code is simple, clean, well organized, and deals with any security / data-integrity issues, you're fine.

The only thing I would think about is how nice Ajax comments are. Users are getting spoiled, and having the page refresh just to comment on something might be considered a nuisance.

Whether to use a hidden field or url is completely up to you - as long as the code processing the data is solid, it shouldn't matter at all, and again, all boils down to preference.