Day 20 - Catalyst::Plugin::Flavour

Adding Sweet Flavours to Catalyst Controllers

Introduction

Have you ever thought about how to handle multiple templates (or views) from one controller?

Plugin::Flavour provides it to you, as "flavour".

If you use Flavour plugin, then a request for

    http://example.com/path/to/action.flavour

is handled by /path/to/action and the "flavour" is stored in $c->flavour.

Now you can use multiple views in one controller like this:

    $c->forward( $c->view( $c->flavour ) );

MAGIC!

Simple tutorial

Load plugin:

    use Catalyst qw/Flavour/;

Next up is configuration. If you use ConfigLoader, you edit myapp.yml:

    flavour:
      default_flavour: html

default_flavour is used when request url has no flavour part. The default value is 'html', so you don't have to write it when you use 'html' as the default_flavour.

Before we forget, create Catalyst::View::TT. Please run ./script/myapp_create.pl view TT TT before continuing.

The next step is to write controllers. In this case, I'll have an html and a json flavour.

Controller code:

    # MyApp::Controller::Root
    sub index : Private {
        my ( $self, $c ) = @_;
        $c->stash->{template} = 'index.' . $c->flavour;
    }

    sub end : ActionClass('RenderView') {}

Then write two templates.

index.html:

    <html>
     <head>
      <title>This is HTML</title>
     </head>
     <body>
      <h1>This is HTML!</h1>
     </body>
    </html>

index.json:

    {title:"This is JSON!"}

Well done!

When you run this app in the development server,

http://localhost:3000/index.html shows index.html,

http://localhost:3000/index.json shows index.json,

and http://localhost:3000/ shows index.html (the default flavour)

Path to controller mapping

Here is list of path to controller mapping used by Plugin::Flavour.

/ | /index | /index.html
    /index
/action | /action.html
    /action
/path/to/ | /path/to/index | /path/to/index.html
    /path/to/index
/path/to | /path/to.html
    /path/to

The last slash is important! Suggestions and patchs are welcome for this mapping!

Accessors for real path

Plugin::Flavour replace $c->request->uri and $c->request->path for tricking the Catalyst dispatcher. It provides additional accessor $c->request->real_uri and $c->request->real_path for the actual uri and path.

AUTHOR

Daisuke Murase (typester) <typester@cpan.org>

Copyright 2006 Daisuke Murase.

This document can be freely redistributed and can be modified and re-distributed under the same conditions as Perl itself.