[Catalyst] Beginner question: View directory

[Kieren Diment]

On 8 Nov 2007, at 15:59, Gerda Shank wrote:

> I'm trying to learn  Catalyst by working my way through the  
> tutorial and other docs, and I'm a little puzzled by the View  
> directory. In the tutorials it only has a TT.pm file in it, which  
> is a config file for Template Toolkit. Are there ever any other  
> kinds of files in that directory? The files that would be  
> considered views in other MVC frameworks (the .tt files, I guess)  
> are put into the root/src and root/lib directories instead of the  
> View directory. Why?

One that jrockway didn't answer.

The template files in root/wherever (you're using TTsite which is  
fine for the tutorial but don't be tempted to use it routinely) are  
editable template files that don't require an app restart to  
refresh.  So you can edit your templates and reload.  They're not  
really code, although template-toolkit contains some programming  
constructs optimised for templating rather than for general purpose  
computing.

TT.pm is the file that contains the programming logic for rendering  
your view.  You can do stuff like set http headers, automatically add  
stuff to the stash/session/whatever and co in here.  It inherits from  
Catalyst::View::TT  the vanilla version of which looks like this:

~$ cat Desktop/dev/WIAB/trunk/WIAB/lib/WIAB/View/TT.pm
package WIAB::View::TT;

use strict;
use base 'Catalyst::View::TT';

# snip a bunch of auto-generated docs


1;

Compare that to what Catalyst::Helper::View::TTSite has produced for  
you and it might start to make some sense...