[Catalyst] Picking template type based on input

[John Napiorkowski]

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>From: Bill Moseley <moseley at hank.org>
>To: The elegant MVC web framework <catalyst at lists.scsys.co.uk>
>Sent: Fri, March 26, 2010 9:15:47 AM
>Subject: Re: [Catalyst] Picking template type based on input
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>On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 5:50 AM, Tomas Doran <bobtfish at bobtfish.net> wrote:
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>>The controller asks the model for some data, and then chooses how to present that data (whilst the view actually handles the presentation details.
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>That means the controllers have to be aware of the view. That is, the controllers have to know what view is going to be used so that it can fetch the data needed for that specific view.  Is that what you are saying?
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I think this is an important point.  Right now the common method in Catalyst is for a controller to sorta 'gather data' into the stash primarily via models and anything that comes into the system from post or get (and maybe checking the flash or session in so cases).  The the controller sort basically lets go of the stash and prays the right thing happens.  Usually we have a terminal end action based on RenderView which asks a View object to 'do the right thing', BUT its that view handler making the choice , like the common TT view (and nearly all the other Views do the same thing) which is a handler that dispatches to the underlying view templating system based on information from the context.  Its a bit too detached I think.

Here's a problem I just recently had.  I'm building a web page which is a gallery of images based on search terms.  In the controller I get the incoming raw parameters, convert them to a search term object and if that object is valid I pass it to a method on my DBIC based schema which returns a resultset of images.

Now, this resultset needs to be paged.  I also have some rules to interpret the requested page so I can handle cases where someone askes for a page beyond the range available in the actual returned resultset.  For that, the controller needs to know the size of the page and number of pages, so I created the paged set inside the controller... but that means my template authors need to change the controller (or a configuration file for that controller) in order to change the page size.  To me that is just a display issue, my model and controller should be asking the view object "what do you want?" I think.  But right now there is no simple way to do this.  Not sure the best solution.

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>-- 
>Bill Moseley
>moseley at hank.org
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