CakePHP-自己的功能

Question

Long story short: I'm integrating the Facebook API (PHP-SDK) with CakePHP (I know that there are already existing integrations out there on GitHub but I use this exercise as a learning curve for CakePHP and MVC in general). My question is the following:

I have a controller action that returns a list of friends, in a very simplistic format:

$data = array(
  'friends' => $this->_facebook->api('/me/friends')
);
$this->set($data);

$data is then being sent to the corresponding view where at the moment I'm simply calling print_r($friends); and that works like a charm. However, I'd like to order the friends array both ascending and descending, and before the MVC world, I was using this function:

public function listFriends($sort = "") {
        $sort = strtolower($sort);
        $friend_array = $this->_facebook->api('/me/friends');
        $friends = array();
        switch ($sort) {
            case "asc":
                foreach($friend_array['data'] as $friend) {
                    $friends[$friend['id']] = $friend['name'];
                }
                natcasesort($friends);
                return $friends;
                break;

            case "desc":
                foreach($friend_array['data'] as $friend) {
                    $friends[$friend['id']] = $friend['name'];
                }
                arsort($friends);
                return $friends;
                break;

            default:
                foreach($friend_array['data'] as $friend) {
                    $friends[$friend['id']] = $friend['name'];
                }
                return $friends;
        }
    }

My question is: how can I achieve the same in CakePHP, where can I place my 'custom' listFriends() function? It's my understanding that if I place this into the controller, then someone can potentially access it by calling http://example.com/controller/listFriends , which I would obviously like to avoid. I also assume that the .ctp file is not the best place for this code to be placed, so where then?

Answer 1

Components is the answer!

Should anyone run into the same 'issue':

<?php
App::uses('Component', 'Controller');
class SortComponent extends Component {
    public function listFriends() {
        //blablablabla
    }
}
?>

And in your controller add the following:

public $components = array('Sort');

and you can access your method by calling

$this->Sort->listFriends()

Cheers!