I'm new to Symfony2 and I've been thinking of the best way to generate navigation bar HTML that is used on every page request - especially with regards to caching.
So imagine if every page request shows the logged in user and a number indicating how many messages are unread (in fact like stackoverflow for that). I'm guessing that could be generated in every controller to ensure the info is up-to-date (using a function or something of course) - but I'm also looking at caching the whole controller output, and think it might be good to keep this dynamic part separate.
Would creating a controller extension for all this kind of stuff be a good way to go? So this way the controller only deals with that specific function (e.g. getting blog posts from a DB etc.) and the controller extension adds all the dynamic content. That way I can cache the controller result and speed up pages without caching the full page (which can't really be done due to lots of dynamic HTML content).
Something like this maybe:
class ControllerExtension extends Controller
{
public function render($view, array $parameters = array(), Response $response = null)
{
//get number of messages for this user
$parameters['messages'] =
//are they logged in
$parameters['logged_in'] =
// render as normal
return parent::render($view, $parameters, $response);
}
}
For this I want to ignore use of JS. I know some of these things could be populated with JS, but I would prefer not for this.