Create Page

Now we are going to create a “Hello world” page in your application. To create a page, we must create an action and a view.

Actions are declared in controllers. The end user will receive the execution result of an action.

Step 1 − Declare the speak action in the existing SiteController, which is defined in the class file controllers/SiteController.php.

<?php 
   namespace app\controllers; 
   use Yii; 
   use yii\filters\AccessControl; 
   use yii\web\Controller; 
   use yii\filters\VerbFilter; 
   use app\models\LoginForm; 
   use app\models\ContactForm; 
   class SiteController extends Controller { 
      /* other code */ 
      public function actionSpeak($message = "default message") { 
         return $this->render("speak",['message' => $message]); 
      } 
   } 
?>

We defined the speak action as a method called actionSpeak. In Yii, all action methods are prefixed with the word action. This is how the framework differentiates action methods from non-action ones. If an action ID requires multiple words, then they will be concatenated by dashes. Hence, the action ID add-post corresponds to the action method actionAddPost.

In the code given above, the ‘out’ function takes a GET parameter, $message. We also call a method named ‘render’ to render a view file called speak. We pass the message parameter to the view. The rendering result is a complete HTML page.

View is a script that generates a response’s content. For the speak action, we create a speak view that prints our message. When the render method is called, it looks for a PHP file names as view/controllerID/vewName.php.

Step 2 − Therefore, inside the views/site folder create a file called speak.php with the following code.

<?php 
   use yii\helpers\Html; 
?> 
<?php echo Html::encode($message); ?> 

Note that we HTML-encode the message parameter before printing to avoid XSS attack.

Step 3 − Type the following in your web browser http://localhost:8080/index.php?r=site/speak&message=hello%20world.

You will see the following window −

The ‘r’ parameter in the URL stands for route. The route’s default format is controllerID/actionID. In our case, the route site/speak will be resolved by the SiteController class and the speak action.