[Catalyst] regexes and auto actions

[Carl Johnstone]

Hi,

I posted this a couple of weeks ago.

> The site is split into many areas (and subareas) defined by URL path, the 
> same types of content appear in each area of the site.
>
> There's stuff that needs setting up that's specific to the area of the 
> site, this appears around the main part of the content of the page and 
> includes stuff like latest articles for that area.
>
> At the same time the actual appearance of the article within the template 
> is always the same, so we don't want to duplicate all the code every time 
> we're dealing with a standard article.
>
> So we have:
>
> /news/
> /news/story/1
> /news/comments/1
> /sport/
> /sport/story/2
> /sport/comments/2
> /sport/football/
> /sport/football/story/3
> /sport/football/comments/3
>
> etc
>
> Our plan was to use auto actions in the various Controllers to define all 
> the area specific stuff. Then use a Regex action in another Controller to 
> actually generate the article.
>
> In practice however only /article/auto and /auto get called.
>
> Any other solution we've come up with has involved adding a story action 
> in every Controller. This will be a drag as for each new type of content 
> we'll need to add an action in every controller.


After some experimentation we've done it by subclassing.

We've defined a article controller with a story/(\d+) LocalRegex action, 
"comments" action and a default index action. Then used this as the base 
class for our news, sport, football, etc Controllers. We can then override 
where the index page is a different style etc.

Carl