Zend Framework：Controller类== Page？

Question

Am I right in thinking that in Zend Framework, if I plan to have 5 pages at my site, I'd generally need 5 controllers? Do ZF developers typically create 1 controller per page ("page" as abtract app unit)?

The reason I am asking this is that previously for some reason I stuffed a lot of various actions into controllers so that they played role of pages, eg index/add, index/view, index/delete and displayed various small screens, eg small CRUD screens as opposed to grids displayed by index action.

But as of now I want to check my new understanding that actions are needed mostly for model updates and actions should, once run, immediately redirect back to controller/index. So it seems that views should mostly be used in index actions, and less frequently in other actions.

Does this sound architecturally valid?

Answer 1

I suppose thats one way of doing it... Using your analogy i suppose i use a controller like a "section" and actions like "pages" to those sections.

But thats getting stuck more on the old procedural||static paradigm of pages because really the action controller itself has no more to do with a page or section than the association you make as a developer. Ie. each page can potentially be a composite of numerous actions and views depening on the application's architecture.

For example if i have a blog modules i might have the following:

Controllers:

• PostController
• CommentController

Views:

• post
  • display (display a single post)
  • list (list posts)
  • edit (create/edit post)
• comment
  • display (display n comments)
  • list (list comments)
  • edit (create/edit/moderate comment)
  • embed-list (for use on the Post itself assuming this differs from display)

Answer 2

In my opinion, a controller should always group multiple methods that have a common use case. Try to find "nouns", that describe the functionality of your app: those are the controllers (while verbs are the controller methods).

If you have (for example) a blog, you may have:

• ArticleListController (listing all articles, listing the top 10, listing all articles for a tag,...)
• SingleArticleController (displaying one article, adding comments,...)
• AdminController (lets you write Articles)

If you have just 5 pages (eg home, about, contact,...) the MVC architecture might not be the right fit.

Answer 3

indexAction is merely the default action for a given controller, useful for displaying a default view (the same as displaying the index.html or index.php page for a sub-directory).

It is completely acceptable to create a variety of actions on a per controller basis that may or may not each have their own views ( ie add and edit). The controller is intended to group similar actions.

For example usage please refer to the documentation on Zend_Controller_Action . You may also find it useful to familiarize yourself with the workflow of Zend_Controller .