[Catalyst] Catalyst Actions precedence

[Kieren Diment]

On 28/02/2013, at 8:25 PM, Nick Anderson wrote:

> 
> Hi Trevor,
> 
> Many thanks for clarifying that. I guess I was hoping for some reliable and predictable outcome for ambiguous requests but it seems the statement "Don't do this" in the URL Path handling section does indeed sum it up! And although it does not explicitly mention chained actions, I presume any URL path ambiguity should/must be avoided.
> 

I think making it clear(er?) in the docs that if you're using Chained in a controller you shouldn't use any other dispatch type would be useful.  Where is the correct place for that to go?

> What I was trying to achieve was a catch-all facility for requests other than application defined actions, up to root level (i.e. for user-specified URLs which are then looked up in a database). For the life of me I can't remember why I avoided using the "default" action to achieve this, probably because I thought being more specific (even just by using a wildcard chain) was the most appropriate way to approach it and more structured.


My preference is to keep Controller::Root very bare, but keep a default (i.e. 404)  handler in there, and an index type action.  


> 
> I presume then, that having a /*/... wildcard action to catch everything else is not advisable? Is using the default action the preferred method then to allow for unknown/dynamic URLs where an application defined action is unavailable?


The usual thing to do with default is to catch 404 errors.