Loading CakePHP Helpers, Components and Behaviors on the fly

Disclaimer: All credit goes to Jose Diaz-Gonzalez, whose post Adding a Helper/Behavior/Component on the fly, contains the 99% of the code I needed to create this component. He’s the one who came up with this idea, I just put it all into a component and added a few tweaks here and there. Thanks, Jose.

FlyLoader @ GitHub: Source (temporary location)

The FlyLoaderComponent will import and load Helpers, Components and Behaviors on the fly. Cases in which this may because useful is if the Helper/Component/Behavior is only needed in certain cases/actions.

The FlyLoader Component

The FlyLoaderComponent consists of the following functions:

load($type, $name)
The load() function will import and initialize your Helper/Component/Behavior accordingly.

$type is the type of object you wish to load, as expected by the $type value in App::import(). The values currently supported are “Component”, “Helper” and “Behavior”.

$name is the name of the Component/Helper/Behavior you wish to load. $name can be String value or a key/value array where the key is the key is the Component/Helper/Behavior name and the value is a key/value array of options/settings passed to the Component/Helper/Behavior.

For example, if you wanted to load my BibleComponent/BibleHelper on the fly (shameless plug), it would look like the following:

class PassageController extends AppController {
    function passages($passage) {
        //load BibleComponent
        $this->FlyLoader->load("Component", 
                array("Bible.Bible" => 
                        array("Esv" => array("key" => "<your key>"))));
 
        //load BibleHelper
        $this->FlyLoader->load("Helper", "Bible.Bible");
 
        $passages = $this->Bible->get_passage($passage);
 
        $this->set("passages", $passages);
    }
}

unload($type, $name)
The unload() function will unload your Helper/Component/Behavior accordingly. Currently, it will only unload Behaviors… Any other $type will simply do nothing. But the placeholders are there in the event that we find reasoning to unload a Helper/Component.

$type is the type of object you wish to unload. The values supported are “Component”, “Helper” and “Behavior”.

$name is the name of the Component/Helper/Behavior you wish to unload. $name is expected to be a String value.