[Catalyst] Cascading action dispatching

[Ash Berlin]

Matthew Pitts wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-10-19 at 17:16 -0400, Matthew Pitts wrote:
>> I'm trying to figure out a way to have my Cat app dispatch in a way
>> that
>> would allow multiple actions in the same namespace and have them
>> called
>> in succession until one of them actually handles the request.
>>
>> I have a client that really likes base-level URLs, like
>> "/shoppingmallxyz", and wants to use them for landing pages that are
>> functionally different. In some of these cases the base-level URL
>> paths
>> are really just monikers for things that are retrieved from the DB and
>> if it exists, then a page is rendered.
> 
> I guess another, maybe more elegant, way to accomplish this same effect
> would be to override register_actions in the Controllers where I want to
> do this and have a call to a register_dynamic_actions method like so:
> 
> package MyApp::Controller::Center;
> 
> sub register_actions {
>     my $self = shift;
>     my ( $c ) = @_;
> 
>     $self->register_dynamic_actions($c);
> 
>     return $self->SUPER::register_actions(@_);    # or NEXT?
> }
> 
> sub register_dynamic_actions {
>     my $self = shift;
>     my ( $c ) = @_;
> 
>     my $centers = $c->model('Center')->all;
> 
>     while ( my $center = $centers->next ) {
>         my $action = $self->create_action(...);
>         $c->dispatcher->register($c, $action);
>     }
> }
> 
> 1;
> 
> An obvious side-effect (AFAIK) of doing it this way is that the app has
> to be restarted for new dynamic actions to take affect. The benefit,
> however, is that the root-level pseudo-actions I was trying to achieve
> with on-the-fly DB lookups are now first class actions and would not
> require a DB call on each request.
> 
> I may be crazy... anybody got any thoughts on this?
> 

Have you looked at Chained actions?

They will give you dispatch trees like

/foo/*/bar

(Where * is any non '/' character)

http://search.cpan.org/~mramberg/Catalyst-Runtime-5.7011/lib/Catalyst/DispatchType/Chained.pm#USAGE


>From a quick skim of you message, it sounds like Chained actions will do
what you want.