At 12:13 PM 06/08/02 +0100, Jeff wrote: >The responsibility of the Controller is to take all the supplied user >input, translate it into the correct format, and pass it to the Model, >and watch what happens. The Model will decide if the instruction can be >realised, or if the system should explode.
I'd like to ask a bit more specific question about this. Really two questions. One about abstracting input, and, a bit mundane, building links from data set in the model. I've gone full circle on handling user input. I used to try to abstract CGI input data into some type of request object that was then passed onto the models. But then the code to create the request object ended up needing to know too much about the model. For example, say for a database query the controller can see that there's a query parameter and thus knows to pass the request to the code that knows how to query the database. That code passes back a results object which then the controller can look at to decide if it should display the results, a "no results" page and/or the query form again. Now, what happens is that features are added to the query code. Let's say we get a brilliant idea that search results should be shown a page at a time (or did Amazon patent that?). So now we want to pass in the query, starting result, and the page size. What I didn't like about this is I then had to adjust the so-called controller code that decoded the user input for my request object to include these new features. But really that data was of only interest to the model. So a change in the model forced a change in the controller. So now I just have been passing in an object which has a param() method (which, lately I've been using a CGI object instead of an Apache::Request) so the model can have full access to all the user input. It bugs me a bit because it feels like the model now has intimate access to the user input. And for things like cron I just emulate the CGI environment. So my question is: Is that a reasonable approach? My second, reasonably unrelated question is this: I often need to make links back to a page, such as a link for "page next". I like to build links in the view, keeping the HTML out of the model if possible. But for something like a "page next" link that might contain a bunch of parameters it would seem best to build href in the model that knows about all those parameters. Anyone have a good way of dealing with this? Thanks, P.S. and thanks for the discussion so far. It's been very interesting. -- Bill Moseley mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
