Scaffolding in CakePHP

What is scaffolding?
Its something that you will find very useful in production apps. When you begin, you may want to throw up stuff real quick in order to get started. Ultimately, its a built in system for adding, editing, viewing and deleting your database records quickly.

Database table
Suppose we want to work with a table named users, and here is its SQL structure

CREATE TABLE `users` (
`id` bigint(20) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`username` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
`name` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
`email` varchar(96) NOT NULL,
`password` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
`updated` int(11) NOT NULL,
`created` int(11) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
UNIQUE KEY `username` (`username`)
)

Model
Now lets create a model file first. It should be placed here: /app/models/user.php

<?
class User extends AppModel
{
var $name = "User";
var $uses = "users" // table name
}
?>

Controller
Create a controller file here: /app/controllers/users_controller.php

<?
class UsersController extends AppController
{
var $name = 'Users';
var $scaffold;
}
?>

View
Not required since the views for scaffolding are generated by CakePHP automatically.

Visit http://yoursite.com/users/ and start scaffolding.
Note: Always visit yoursite.com/controllerName/ to see the visual output of your controller.

I will show you a user registration and logging system in CakePHP soon.