如何设计Controller，Component，View和Helper之间的关系

Question

I have a trouble with software design. I want to design a relation between Controller, Component, View and Helper. Ihave these models Aricle, Product, List . And in contents of Article and Product there are lists tags in form of [LIST=1].

So I'd like to render these lists and inject them into content in place of tags. I thought that good idea would be a ListRendererHelper which would render lists inside of View like this $this->ListRenderer->renderList($listId). And it would be a good idea if I list ids in database, but I should obtain it from content. And this is not good practice to manipulate with objects inside of View nor insert a lot of PHP code in View.

So I think that best place to manipulate content is Controller, and here obtain the lists ids. But I shouldn't use Helper in Controller so I think that I should make a Component for Controller. And here is my problem, because I will have to write render code twice in Component and in Helper which is against DRY. Other solution is to call Helper inside Component but that would be a MVC break too. So anyone have an idea how to design it?

Answer 1

Manipulating data in a controller and render code in a component? Calling a helper inside a component? What the...? From where did you get these plain wrong ideas? You've understood MVC completely wrong.

You want a model method to get your data or to manipulate data. All data fetching and maniplation should happen in the model layer.

MyModel::getSomeFancyData($arg1, $arg2);
MyModel::manipulateMyFancyData($data);

The controller just passes the data along to the view. Controllers should be always as slim as possible.

$this->set('fancyData', $this->Model->getSomeFancyData());

Inside the view use a helper for recurring view logic. If you need to render large chunks for HTML that repeat better use an element or call that element from inside a helper.

I suggest you to read about the basics of MVC and CakePHP:

• http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/cakephp-overview/understanding-model-view-controller.html
• http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/getting-started.html

This isn't specific to CakePHP, you won't have a benefit from any framework if you're not able to apply the basic concepts like MVC to them.