Hello,
I'm dealing with the following dilemma, simply cannot decide what's
the best approach. Your $0.02 is highly appreciated!
Consider the following structure: User hasMany Photoset, which in turn
hasMany Photo.
The UserController has a view (/users/view/{id}) action, which shows
the user's data and its photosets. Each photoset is represented as its
title and the total number of photos within the set. Since in this
action we do not need to have the data of all a photoset's photos at
our disposal, we unbinded the Photoset hasMany Photo association. As a
result, in order to know how many photos a photoset contains, we need
to query this additionally.
Obviously, the method that will perform this photo-count-query is to
be implemented in the Photoset Model, as it is meta-data of a
Photoset.
Now the question is:
>From where do we call this method? -OR- How do we move the result of
this method from model to view?
Option 1: from the Controller
Your first reaction might be; easy, that's what a Controller is for!
It has access to the Model and can hand data over the View. True, but
in our situation this approach has a huge disadvantage as well.
Remember that we are talking about the UserController here, while the
values we want to obtain are the total number of photos for *every*
photoset that belongs to this user. I.e. if we want to call the photo-
count-method from the Controller, it means we will have to loop all
photosets belonging to this user, call the method and store its result
for every one of them and pass this information forward to the View.
Then of course the View will have to loop all of them again. That's a
lot of code and redundant loops!
Option 2: from the View
Eventually, we need to have the photo-count-value at our disposal in
the appropriate View. So it would be convenient to send out the
request for this value in the View as well. But, from a View we can
reach Controller nor Model directly, so this is a problem. Our only
option would be to call requestAction, but considered that we just
need a single integer value (the photo count) that feels like
overkill. Furthermore, we just need some basic data from the database
-- no controlling involved -- so a call to the Model seems more
appropriate than a call to the Controller (???). The only type of call
that we can make to the Model is a static one though, which is
insufficient for our needs, since we will be using the Model's find*
methods which are instance methods.
That were our options. None of them satisfies me. What would be your
approach?
Tim
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