Dear Reader,

I’ve been teaching a Zend Framework class this week and my students have been throwing all kinds of questions at me. Most recently, while we were discussing creating a Bootstrap class for an application a question came up about the _init* functions.

The manual states that

$bootstrap->bootstrap();

will fire all of the _init* functions in the bootstrap class. However, the question came up, in what order? Thanks to friends like Rob Allen (author of “Zend Framework in Action“), I was able to give them the answer.

The answer is, usually, in the order of execution, however, these is an exception.

Given this bootstrap class:

< ?php
 
class Bootstrap extends Zend_Application_Bootstrap_Bootstrap
{ protected function _initDoctype() { $this->bootstrap('view'); $view = $this->getResource('view'); $view->doctype('XHTML1_STRICT'); }
  protected function _initAutoload() { $autoloader = new Zend_Application_Module_Autoloader(array( 'namespace' => 'Default_', 'basePath' => dirname(__FILE__), )); return $autoloader; }
 
  public function _initRoutes() { $front = Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance(); $router = $front->getRouter(); $route = new Zend_Controller_Router_Route(':language/:module/:controller/:action/*', array('language' => 'en', 'module' => 'default', 'controller' => 'index', 'action' => 'index' ) ); $router->addRoute('lang_default', $route); }   Public function _initMyFirstInit() { /// stuff goes here }
  Public function _initMySecondInit() { /// stuff goes here }
  Public function _initMyThirdInit() { /// stuff goes here }
}

Now, in this example I have 6 _init* functions. When I call

$bootstrap->bootstrap();

in my index.php, it will fire them in the order that they were created.

However, if I have one that needs to be called first, out of order, I can use:

$bootstrap->bootstrap(‘MySecondInit’);

That will fire _initMySecondInit() manually.

Then, when I call

$bootstrap->bootstrap();

It will fire the rest of the methods, in order, skipping _initMySecondInit() because it’s already been called.

That’s an amazing piece of code.

Thanks again to Rob Allen for helping figure this out.

Until Next time
I <3 |<
=C=

Tags: bootstrap, hints, PHP, Programming, tips, zend framework, zend_application

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