What is a CakePHP Behavior?

Question

What exactly is a CakePHP behavior? Where and how should I use it?

Answer 1

Behaviors in CakePHP are living on the model side of the framework. Since we all prefer to create a reusable and dry logic, behaviors are provided by CakePHP to get away from 'ugly' and extra code. Behaviors "change" the way models behaves, enforcing it to "act as" something.

You can think of them, that they are for models, what components are for controllers and helpers are for views. Behaviors help you make your code more abstract, not to mention that they can be shared across different models.

When you force a model to behave as something or as some things, you just use functions of that behavior(s). Of course later you can take away or perhaps temporarily force a model to forget about this or that behavior.

There lots of other stuff that you can ask models about behaviors, for example check if model behaves like this or that, if not to behave.

Generally, you tell a model to behave using public $actAs = array(); statement, but you can do it by $this->ModelName->Behaviors->load('BehaviorName') too.

You use them in models of course. Unless you implement your own behaviors rather than use tons of them available at the bakery, you load them and use them as if models already supported such kinds of functions.