Yes, with your tag cloud example, the core functionality for this
might be best placed in the model.
One reason to go through requestAction to call the model functionality
is to reuse views.
For example, perhaps your list of top ten posts in a specified
category should appear the same way in loads of your pages: in that
case, it might be handy to have a controller aciton that calls the ´fat
´ model, and returns the completed view.
If, however, you need multiple views of the same data, then as you say
it might be better just to access the fat model in various different
controllers, and pass this onto different views.
On Dec 3, 2:42 pm, SeanW <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Dec 2, 7:56 pm, Adam Royle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > Using elements is what you want. Inside the elements you can use
> > requestAction to get at any data you wish to use. You can return an
> > array of data directly, or render a view. See tutorial here for an
> > example (and also how to cache the result)
>
> That tutorial certainly explains requestAction and how cool it is, but
> I'm left thinking "what happened to the skinny controller, fat model"
> concept? Why am I going to wind my way (again) through the Cake
> framework only to get at a piece of data that the model should know
> about anyway?
>
> For example, tag cloud. We have a tag model, presumably linked to
> posts or something. Within the tag model I'd have a function,
> tagCloud, that would return the tag cloud in an array, something like
>
> $ret[0]["tag"] = "cake";
> $ret[0]["count"] = "5";
> $ret[1]["tag"] = "php";
> $ret[1]["count"] = "6";
>
> In the controller generating the post, we'd add "Tags" to the $uses
> array, and in the action do a
>
> $this->set("tagcloud", $this->Tag->tagCloud());
>
> The tag cloud HTML would be encapsulated in an element so that anyone
> could use it from the view, $this->renderElement("tagcloud",
> array("data" => $tagcloud))
>
> None of this precludes using requestAction... In fact the reason I
> arrived at this conclusion is by starting off there, realizing the job
> of collecting the tag cloud data belongs in the model, realized we
> need an element anyway, so why bother using requestAction when I can
> just set() it in the controller and still be blissfully unaware about
> how the data is constructed?
>
> BTW this extends to the other cases the OP mentioned, ie $this->Books-
>
> >getReadingList(5), etc.
>
> The post that opened my eyes to the fat model concept:
>
> http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2006/10/18/skinny-controller-fat-model
>
> It's written for Ruby on Rails, but it's easy enough to translate to
> PHP.
>
> Sean
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