Saying hello

Note: This document reflects the current configuration. The Yii team is going to make it simpler before release.

This section describes how to create a new “Hello” page in your application. It’s a simple page that will echo back whatever you pass to it or, if nothing passed, will just say “Hello!”.

To achieve this goal, you will define a route and create a handler that does the job and forms the response. Then you will improve it to use view for building the response.

Through this tutorial, you will learn three things:

1. How to create a handler to respond to request.
2. How to map URL to the handler.
3. How to create a view to compose the response’s content.

Creating a Handler

For the “Hello” task, you will create a EchoController class with say method that reads a message parameter from the request and displays that message back to the user. If the request doesn’t provide a message parameter, the action will display the default “Hello” message.

Create src/Controller/EchoController.php:

<?php

declare(strict_types=1);

namespace App\Controller;

use Psr\Http\Message\ResponseFactoryInterface;
use Psr\Http\Message\ResponseInterface;
use Yiisoft\Html\Html;
use Yiisoft\Router\CurrentRoute;

class EchoController
{
    private ResponseFactoryInterface $responseFactory;

    public function __construct(ResponseFactoryInterface $responseFactory)
    {
        $this->responseFactory = $responseFactory;
    }

    public function say(CurrentRoute $currentRoute): ResponseInterface
    {
        $message = $currentRoute->getArgument('message', 'Hello!');

        $response = $this->responseFactory->createResponse();
        $response->getBody()->write('The message is: ' . Html::encode($message));
        return $response;
    }
}

The say method in your example is given $currentRoute parameter that you can use to obtain a message, whose value defaults to "Hello". If the request is made to /say/Goodbye, the $message variable within the action will be assigned that value.

The response returned goes through middleware stack into emitter that outputs response to the end user.

Configuring router

Now, to map your handler to URL, you need to add a route in config/common/routes.php:

<?php

declare(strict_types=1);

use App\Controller\EchoController;
use App\Controller\SiteController;
use Yiisoft\Router\Route;

return [
    Route::get('/')->action([SiteController::class, 'index'])->name('home'),
    Route::get('/say[/{message}]')->action([EchoController::class, 'say'])->name('echo/say'),
];

In the above you’re mapping /say[/{message}] pattern to EchoController::say(). For a request its instance will be created and say() method will be called. The pattern {message} part means that anything specified in this place will be written to message request attribute. [] means that this part of the pattern is optional.

You also give a echo/say name to this route to be able to generate URLs pointing to it.

Trying it out

After creating the action and the view, start a web server with ./yii serve and follow the following URL:

http://localhost:8080/say/Hello+World

This URL will result in a page displaying “The message is: Hello World”.

If you omit the message parameter in the URL, you would see the page display “The message is: Hello!”.

Creating a View Template

Usually, the task is more complicated than printing out “hello world” and involves rendering some complex HTML. For this task, it’s handy to use views templates. They’re scripts you write to generate a response’s body.

For the “Hello” task, create a /resources/views/echo/say.php view that prints the message parameter received from the action method:

<?php
use Yiisoft\Html\Html;
/* @var string $message */
?>

<p>The message is: <?= Html::encode($message) ?></p>

Note that in the above code, the message parameter is HTML-encoded before being printed. This is necessary as the parameter comes from an end user, making it vulnerable to cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks by embedding malicious JavaScript in the parameter.

Naturally, you may put more content in the say view. The content can consist of HTML tags, plain text, and even PHP statements. In fact, the say view is a PHP script that’s executed by the view service.

To use the view you need to change src/Controller/EchoController.php:

<?php

declare(strict_types=1);

namespace App\Controller;

use Yiisoft\Yii\View\ViewRenderer;
use Yiisoft\Router\CurrentRoute;
use Psr\Http\Message\ResponseInterface;

class EchoController
{
    private ViewRenderer $viewRenderer;
    
    public function __construct(ViewRenderer $viewRenderer)
    {
        $this->viewRenderer = $viewRenderer->withControllerName('echo');
    }

    public function say(CurrentRoute $route): ResponseInterface
    {
        $message = $route->getArgument('message', 'Hello!');

        return $this->viewRenderer->render('say', [
            'message' => $message,
        ]);
    }
}

Now open your browser and check it again. It should give you similar text but with a layout applied.

Also, you’ve separated the part about how it works and part of how it’s presented. In the larger applications, it helps a lot to deal with complexity.

Summary

In this section, you’ve touched the handler and view parts of the typical web application. You created a handler as part of a class to handle a specific request. You also created a view to compose the response’s content. In this simple example, no data source was involved as the only data used was the message parameter.

You’ve also learned about routing in Yii, which acts as the bridge between user requests and handlers.

In the next section, you will learn how to fetch data, and add a new page containing an HTML form.