XSS safe content in yii

In this post I am going to describe a solution to make your yii-based web application safe from illegal content injections.

I am going to make a use of the the yii wrapped htmlpurifier class inside a behavior. this behavior could be attached to any model with declaring the attributes we would like to make them XSS safe.

I have wrote the following behavior :

class CSafeContentBehavior extends CActiveRecordBehavior
{
   public $attributes =array();
   protected $purifier;

   function __construct(){
      $this->purifier = new CHtmlPurifier;
   }

   public function beforeSave($event)
   {
      foreach($this->attributes as $attribute){
         $this->getOwner()->{$attribute} = $this->purifier->purify($this->getOwner()->{$attribute});
      }
   }
}

place this class in a file in your application directory, for example : application/behaviors/CSafeContentBehavior.php
Now in your model you attach the behavior like this :

class Post extends CActiveRecord
{
   public function behaviors(){
      return array(
         'CSafeContentBehavor' => array(
         'class' => 'application.behaviors.CSafeContentBehavior',
         'attributes' => array('title', 'body'),
      ),
   );
}

Here we go. Our Post model will now purify title and body columns before each save operation.