The app Class

The apex\app class is the main / central class for all Apex applications, and is used to facilitate every request. It handles the HTTP request and response, dependency injection container, services, stores all information regarding the request such as inputted data via POST / GET methods, and more.

This class is a singleton, meaning only one instance is ever created per-request, allowing it to also be accessed statically for better accessibility. It is always loaded in virtually every PHP file by simply loading the apex\app namespace such as:

namespace apex\mypackage;

use apex\app;

... rest of the code ...

1. Input Arrays (POST, GET, COOKIE, etc.)
2. Configuration Variables
3. Apex Request
4. HTTP Request
5. HTTP Response
6. Additional
7. Dependency Injection

Input Arrays

_post(), _get(), _cookie(), _server(), _files() Methods

For security purposes, never use the super globals such as $_POST and $_GET, and instead only use these methods to retrieve input data, as these variables are properly sanitized. For example:

namespace apex;

use apex\app;

$category_id = app::_get('category_id') ?? 0;
$name = app::_post('full_name');

has_post(), has_get(), has_cookie(), has_server() Methods

These methods should always be used in place of PHP's built-in is<a href="https://apex-platform.org/api/classes/apex.app.sys.container.html#method_set" target="_blank">set()</a> function, and they simply return a boolean whether or not the requested variable exists. For example:

namespace apex;

use apex\app;

if (!app::has_post('note')) {
    echo "No 'note' variable was defined!";
}

getall_post(), getall_get(), getall_cookie(), getall_server() Methods

These return an array consisting of all key-value pairs of the corresponding array. For example:

namespace apex;

use apex\app;

$post_vars = app::getall_post();

clear_post() / clear_get() Methods

This allows you to clear the POST and GET input arrays, Useful for example, after a form has been submitted and action completed successfully, you may want to clear the POST array so the form displayed on the template again is not pre-filled in with the previously submitted data.

Configuration Variables

All global configuration variables as defined by the installed packages can be retrived with the following methods:

Apex Request

There are various methods available to obtain and set information regarding the request that is specific to Apex, and are explained in the below table.

Examples

namespace apex;

use apex\app;


// Submit button from previous form was "create"
if (app::get_action() == 'create') {

    // Display the /public/winner template instead if first 500 members.
    if (app::get_userid() <= 500) {
        app::set_uri('winner');
    }

}

HTTP Request

The below methods allow you to retrive various information about the HTTP request itself. Please note, this information is read-only and can not be set.

HTTP Response

The below methods allow you to control the response that is given back to the client.

Additional

There's various additional methods available that will be useful at times, and are explaind in the below table.

Dependency Injection

The app class also acts as the container for dependency injection. This is explained in more detail elsewhere in the documentation, but the methods available are explained below.