[Catalyst] A View that may include elements optionally returnedfrom other funcs

[Joe Landman]

On Wed, 25 Apr 2007 11:58:02 +0100, Carl Johnstone wrote
> > Ugh...   Assume that the view gets everything from controller.  Then this 
> > controller is the thing that should gather everything together before 
> > shipping it to the view.  Let the template decide the form, let the 
> > controller decide the content.
> 
> That's fair enough, but say you've got 20 possible page elements of 
> which typically 5 or 6 are included in the final page. Would you 
> still suggest that the Controller should initialize any data for all 
> 20 elements onto the stash?

Absolutely not.  On the contrary, I specifically indicated that blank sections
should be left undef.  If the stash for that section is undef, then the view
can completely (programmatically) skip that section.

> 
> What if some of those elements are relatively expensive to generate?

See above, and please refer to my original note.

> 
> What Steve wants is some way of being able to decide in the View 
> which of those elements are included and load them accordingly.

... and this should be done at the controller level is what I am saying.  You
can even have your controller select a particular view based upon the
available data if you wish.  Or have a single view template handle everything
(and only render bits that are defined, which is what I had indicated, this
way you do not have to construct everything, just what you need).

> 
> The best solution I can come up with is passing coderefs into your 
> view which can then be run to retrieve the data would something like 
> this work?
> 
> $c->stash->{'get_most_popular'} = sub {
>   return $c->model('DB')->some_expensive_db_op();
> };

Maybe I am confused about MVC, but wouldn't you want the view to decide how to
present what is sent to it by the controller, and hence have the controller
handle this?

> 
> Carl
> 
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