CakePHP-Plist

With CakePHP-Plist it’s easy to generate Plists from your CakePHP app. It uses a view class, so you can use it by extension parsing, just like the built-in JSON support. Both plain and binary plists are supported.

Installation

• Add the plugin to your app.
• Import the plugin in your bootstrap.php by adding CakePlugin::load('Plist', array('bootstrap' => false, 'routes' => true));. Make sure you enable routes or add Router::parseExtensions('plist’); to your own route file.
• Replace the existing $Dispatcher->dispatch() call in your webroot/index.php to the code below. This is necessary because CakePHP doesn’t know how to handle plist files.

$Dispatcher->dispatch(
    new CakeRequest(),
    new CakeResponse(array(
        'type' => array(
            'plist' => 'application/xml',
            'plist-binary' => 'application/x-plist',
        )
    ))
);

• Load the RequestHandler in either the AppController or any other controller you would like to use it in. You need to let the RequestHandler know about the plugin:

public $components = array('RequestHandler' => array(
    'viewClassMap' => array(
        'plist' => 'Plist.Plist'
    )
));

Usage

To generate plists from your app, you simple use CakePHP’s serialization method, as shown on this web page: http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/views/json-and-xml-views.html.

Simple example to test the installation:

class PlistTestController extends AppController {
    public $uses = array();
    public function test() {
        $data = array(
            'names' => array(1, 2, 3)
        );
        $_serialize = array_keys($data);
        $this->set(compact('_serialize') + $data);
    }
}

Open /plist_test/test.plist to see if it works. If both JSON (or even XML) and Plist extension parsing is enabled, you can get either of them by changing the extension.

Binary

To get a binary plist, you can either set a _binaryPlist view var to true to get a single action rendered as a binary plist or set a binaryPlist config value to true.

If you have a config value set, the view var will overrule it.