The Zend Framework in Practice

This post looks at a simple custom resource plugin that I’ve recently created for populating the registry with values from the application configuration file. I have already examined adding a Log plugin and a View plugin in previous posts; the basic technique for adding this one is the same.

First we need a line like this in the configuration file to allow the bootstrapper to find our plugin:

pluginPaths.Application_Resource = APPLICATION_PATH "/resources"

The key Application_Resource indicates the prefix given to the class that implements the plugin, minus its trailing underscore. The value indicates the location in which the plugins with this prefix are stored.

The class itself is implemented in Registry.php in the resources directory. It contains the following code:

<?php
class Application_Resource_Registry 
  extends Zend_Application_Resource_ResourceAbstract
{
  public function init()
  {
    // Get the registry object
    $registry = Zend_Registry::getInstance();
 
    // Get the options that should be placed in the registry
    $options = $this->getOptions();
 
    // Add the options to the registry
    foreach ($options as $index => $value)
    {
      $registry->set($index, $value);
    }
 
    return $registry;
  }
}

The code should be fairly self-explanatory. The options are key/value pairs retrieved from the configuration file, e.g.

resources.registry.phone = "phone number"

In the above case, the value “phone number” is stored under the index phone in the registry.