I have seen some basic examples of controllers where, in their indexAction() method, they do something like echo 'This is an index action'. But in real applications, would that method return a long string of html, starting with <html>?
Thanks.
In reality, most controllers use XML layouts to generate a series of logical blocks that should be displayed on the page, and then render those blocks recursively to build the page. Note that they do not actually return that string, and the layout classes are responsible for getting the output into the right place. This is the code you'll usually see for this case:
$this->loadLayout();
$this->renderLayout();
Using echo is a quick shorthand that lets the developer ignore the entire layout system temporarily and just focus on triggering the correct action.
Hope that clears things up a bit!
Thanks,
Joe
The examples you've seen are just to show you that code in the controller is executing. What you're supposed to do in a Magento controller is
Manipulate models based on values from the request (get, post, etc.)
Tell Magento to load and render the layout that will make up the response
The layout/block system reads directly from the system model classes, so there's no need to do anything output related in the controller (that's not 100% true, but if you know the reasons it's not 100% true you didn't need to read this far in the answer)
If you look at Magento Core controllers, you'll most of them ends with
$this->loadLayout();
$this->renderLayout();
These are the lines that start output. No echo required.
Related
https://github.com/adymitruk/fubumvc/commit/083e1d593d4e797ac04fb493acd1e29a332cd303?w=1
It seems returning a continuation breaks the binding to the view. It used to work before I added the continuation. Now I get a blank page for the default view.
You're using the same input model for your get and your post, so when you transfer, you get into an endless loop. I'm surprised you don't get a stackoverflow. There must be some checking in FubuContinuation that breaks the loop.
You're using the input model as the view model which you (generally) shouldn't do.
Your form tag needs to be a
Also, it looks like due to the naming of your models and the folders, the default view conventions weren't matching up views to your actions. To get things working, I threw them all in the same folder (bad, I know).
You'll want to sort out the folders and namespaces before doing anything serious with this.
Here's the pull request which I was able to get working and posting and such:
https://github.com/adymitruk/fubumvc/pull/1
I know that we can design the layout in *.xml then in the action just invoke loadLayout, and renderLayout to render the blocks/views.
But, I have a question is:
- How can I load the layout at runtime?
If we have an action which does not really design its layout and will be decided how to render at runtime.
You can please consider the answer from the question for more clear.
Writing a new answer because it seems that you actually DO still want to render, you just want to render a different route's layout XML updates. I believe the _forward() method from Mage_Core_Controller_Varien_Action will allow you to do what you are describing with the least amount of pain.
You should add your action controller directory ahead of the catalog directory, create a ProductController with a viewAction, and check customer is not logged in - in this check you would call $this->_forward('customer','account','login');.
This approach though is going to require more effort in order to be usable, as I imagine that you want the user to be sent to the product page upon login. Have you seen Vinai Kopp's Login Only Catalog module? It should do this for you.
loadLayout() and renderLayout() just execute block output method toHtml() (usually) and take the resulting strings and apply them to the response object via appendBody(). In an action controller you can just call $this->getResponse()->setBody('response string'). How you build the string is up to you.
You can also use Mage_Core_Block_Flush to immediately send output to the browser without using the response object.
A bit of context: I need to cache the homepage of my CakePHP site - apart from one small part, which displays events local to the user based on their IP address.
You can obviously use the <cake:nocache> tag to dictate a part of the page that shouldn't be cached; but you can't surround a controller-set variable with these tags to make it dynamic. Once a page is cached, that's it for the controller action, as far as I know.
What you can usefully surround with the nocache tags are elements and helpers. As such, I've created an element inside these tags, which calls a helper function to access the model and get the appropriate data. To get at the model from the helper I'm using:
$this->Modelname =& ClassRegistry::init("Modelname");
This seems to me, however, to be a kind of iffy way of doing things, both in terms of CakePHP and general MVC principles. So my question is, is this an appropriate way of getting what I want to do done, or should it ring warning bells? Is there a much better way of achieving my objectives that I'm just missing here?
Rather than using a Helper, try to put your code in an element and use requestAction inside of the element.
see this link
http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/gwoo/2007/04/12/creating-reusable-elements-with-requestaction
This would be a much better approach than trying to use a model in your helper.
Other than breaking all the carefully-laid principles of MVC?
In addition to putting this item into an element, why not fetch it with a trivial bit of ajax?
Put the call in its own controller action, such that the destination URL -> /controller/action (quite convenient!)
Pass the IP back to that action for use in the find call
Set the ajax update callback to target within the element with the results of the call accordingly
No need to muck around calling Models directly from Views, and no need to bog things down with requestAction. :)
HTH
I want to employ CakePHP's basic caching functionality on my site's home page. However, there is one element on the page that should display different data depending on the visitor's location, as determined by their IP address.
You can't wrap <cake:nocache> around variables that are set in the controller, which is where I was previously determining the location and getting the data. My question therefore is: where can I optimally set a (session?) variable to contain visitor location information before the controller? How can I use this information to populate an array of data for the nocached portion of the view, while completely sidestepping the controller action, which is no longer being called?
Any advice greatly appreciated!
Hmm, well, apparently CakePHP questions aren't of much interest to the world at large: only 8 views in 2 days :(
In any case I investigated a bit further and discovered that, while the <nocache> tags don't let you surround variables to make them dynamic, they DO allow you to make non-caching calls to elements or helpers. I therefore extracted the relevant part of my page into an element, and populated the data array by calling a helper function.
This did mean that I had to access the model from inside the helper with
$this->Modelname =& ClassRegistry::init("Modelname");
and I'm not sure this is necessarily the respectful CakePHP and/or MVC way of doing things, but at least it's some way towards a solution!
I'm kind of new with CodeIgniter and I'm still learning (a lot).
So I have a view and when I submit a form I 'call' the controller by surfing to the right URL dynamically e.g. site/delete
class Site extends Controller {
function index(){$this->load->view('...')}
function delete() {
$this->site_model->delete_row();
$this->index();
}
}
Now when that action is done (deleted the row) I'm calling $this->index(); to redirect to my initial page (which is good) but my url stays: site/delete . I want my URL to be ../site/index (or without the /index)
Any help would be appreciated :-) .
So far I found something to solve this:
instead of:
$this->index();
I'm using:
redirect('site');
Does anyone know this is a good practice?
Redirect is what you should use.
In the user guide:
http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/helpers/url_helper.html
they use it after checking if a user is logged in. Depending on if they are or not, they redirect to a different place.
Also, note that any code after the redirect won't run. Make sure and redirect after you've done everything you need to.
My preferred method is to have actions like that handled by the same method that will be seen by the user afterwards.
What if you go to /site/delete afterwards, as a user? It will either have to detect and throw a error (show a message) or redirect to an appropriate page. /site/delete has no meaning.
For example, if a user would normally see an overview after deleting, then my form will be posted to /site/index; with index quickly checking for the condition and calling _delete() in the same controller, before doing its normal work.
That way, if the user refreshes the page, or presses 'back', things should look consistent to them.
Another example would be that /settings/edit would post to itself - this means that it can act on the post and show any output (e.g. validation errors). It means there's no /settings/do_edit location on my site, and also means that the user can go back to /settings/edit safely, and see a form for editing their settings.
I suppose this is a subjective take on a perhaps objective question, and I would encourage feedback on my view, but it's my way of avoiding the problem you have asked about.
$this->index();
Call of function in a function simply execute the functionality within that function.
And url never changed.
for changing the url you should use.
redirect ( base_url().'site');
but you should load url helper in constructor.