Using components outside of controllers in CakePHP

Question

Is it possible to use the built-in CakePHP components (eg: EmailComponent) as standalone classes?

I know this probably shows a design flaw, and that I'm not doing it the Cake way or something, but I have a class which is not tied to any Model/Controller and I want that to be able to send emails. Importing the EmailComponent doesn't work, since it tries to read information from $this->Controller which is obviously null in this situation.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Try using App::import.

App::import('Component', 'Email');
$email = new EmailComponent();

Note that you might need to pass null as a parameter in the constructor since I think it might normally be expecting a reference to the controller. This might cause issues with regards to the EmailComponent locating layouts and views though, you'll have to play around.

Answer 2

App::import('Core', 'Controller');
App::import('Component', 'Email');
$this->Controller =& new Controller();
$this->Email =& new EmailComponent(null);
$this->Email->initialize($this->Controller);

See comment 11 of EmailComponent in a (cake) Shell, should work for you.

Answer 3

I'm pretty sure the cake way to do this is to make the component a vendor, if that's not too much of a pain. Then it would be accessible anywhere in the codebase. You could use this code in the beforeFilter and use it just like a component in your controller.

App::import('Vendor', 'EmailVendor');
$this->EmailVendor = new EmailVendor($this);