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Controlling the Flow with Controllers

In the previous chapters we already transcribed the Domain of our example extension SJROffers to a software based Domain Model. This lead to multiple files with class definitions, to be found in the extension subfolder sjr_offers/Classes/Domain/Model/. Furthermore we set up the persistence layer. As a result we are already able to deposit the data of our Domain in the form of Domain Objects and to retrieve it again.

In this chapter you'll see how to control the flow inside of your extension. The bottom line is to evaluate requests of the website user, in order to trigger the appropriate action. Regarding our example extension SJROffers, it may make sense to show a list of all offers or to give out all relevant information to one offer. Further examples of actions are:

  • Deleting a specific offer

  • Deleting all offers of one organization

  • Displaying a form to change the data of an offer

  • Updating an offer

  • Listing the newest offers

The code for receiving the request and for executing the appropriate action is combined in Controllers. A Controller is a component of the Model-View-Controller architecture, of which the basics are described in chapter 2, section "Model-View-Controller in Extbase". The operation of a Controller interconnected with the other components was described in chapter 3.

A Controller is an object of an extension, which is instantiated and called inside of extbase by the Dispatcher object. The controller takes care of the complete flow inside of the extension. It is the link between the Request, the Domain Model and the reaction in form of the Response. Inside of the Controller, the data necessary for the flow is fetched from the respective Repositories, prepared according to the demand from outside and passed to the code responsible for the output (View). Besides this main task, a Controller is responsible for:

  • accepting the Request and Response object, respectively rejecting them, in case they can not be processed.

  • inducing a check of the data coming in from the URL (especially from links) or forms of the Frontend. This data has to be checked for type and validity.

  • checking which method (Action) of the Controller shall be called for further processing.

  • preparing the incoming data, so it can be passed to the method in charge (Argument Mapping)

  • initiating the rendering process.

  • passing the output of the rendering process to the Response object.

In the following section, we'll create the necessary Controller Classes of our extension and and therein implement the adequate Action methods. For this, we'll first have to decide, which Actions have to be implemented. For an extension usually needs multiple different Actions, we'll group them in different Controller Classes. A very "natural" way of grouping would be: Every Aggregate Root Class, containing objects on which an Action shall be applied, is administered by a proper Controller. In our case the two classes Organization and Offer are indicated. Now let's start with our first Controller.