[Catalyst] Cascading action dispatching

[John Napiorkowski]

--- Matt S Trout <dbix-class at trout.me.uk> wrote:

> On Sun, Oct 21, 2007 at 10:20:20AM -0400, 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?
> 
> Yes, you're crazy.
> 
> OTOH you appear to be the same same sort of crazy I
> was when I wrote
> register_actions and intentionally factored the
> process in such a way
> that it was overridable, so don't let that stop you
> implementing this.
> 
> The only better solution I can think of is to handle
> whether you accept the
> action via an action class, but we need to add a
> $action->match_captures for
> chain mid-points to make that elegant, currently you
> only get a match on the
> end point which would be a bit messy to implement.
> 
> I plan to add such a method for 5.80

Matt,

I actually started playing with this a few months ago
(wrote some tests for the expected behavior, etc) but
had a little trouble getting it to work correctly. 
Did you actually start on this?  Because if you have a
plan I would be happen to be the implementation
monkey.  --John

> 
> -- 
>       Matt S Trout       Need help with your
> Catalyst or DBIx::Class project?
>    Technical Director                   
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