Apparently not…
And I do mean that in a good way.
You know, this topic has been brought up a number of times before, but a recent post on google group, inspired me to do some copy/pasting.
First, I think, Martin Westin did an excellent job of explaining the basis of the disrespect for the usage of requestAction()
(I’m quoting him without permission and I hope that he doesn’t come looking for me to kick my ass)
requestAction() is a bit seductive. It can look like a simple solution
to a lot of things but the problem (that you notice later on) is that
is has a high “cost” in the processing overhead and in that you don’t
improve your design instead of using the “quick fix”.When requestAction() is called you are effectively making a new
request more or less as you would by refreshing the browser. You are
starting up the router and dispatcher again. You are instantiating a
new controller, loading new Models, querying the database. And, worst
of all as I understand it, you are often doing a full render of an
extra View. All this results in a very costly feature.There are times when requestAction is a good tool (the only tool?) but
they are quite few. But without knowing your application I can’t say
if you have a justified situation or not. I always feel dutifully
ashamed each time i use this feature which forces me to think if I
can’t get around my problem some other way :)In my current project I actually have a few but in those cases doing
without it is too complicated for my taste and in only one instance is
the processing overhead an issue.
Then I decided to chime in with a coupe of alternatives…
…but just to add a little… in terms of good practice… think about the usage of requestAction()
1. Are you getting some data from another model and returning it to the current controller?
In that case you are better off doing:
$myData = $this->CurrentModel->SomeOtherModel->getMyData();
You are doing two important things here. First, you are not using requestAction() :)
Secondly, you are offloading business logic of data gathering to the model… where it really belongs.
2. Also, if you already have a controller with an action that does return some data, the legitimate question is why would one “duplicate” the code in the model as well?
Actually, you are best to move that code to the model.
Indeed, even your controller will benefit… even if you’ve got a simple find(), you can wrap it in a method inside the model such as findMeSomeCandy(); and easily call that from your controller’s find_candy()
find_candy() {
$this->set(‘candy’, $this->Candy->findMeSomeCandy());
}
Thereby also enabling to access the same method from another controller via model relation.
Even if you need it from a completely un-related model, you can do:
$candy = ClassRegistry::init(‘Candy’)->findMeSomeCandy();
Hopefully it servers as useful reminder to some… and, as always, food for thought for others.
Also, so you don’t have to dig in the comments, Mark Story (I hope you know him from such interesting endeavors as CakePHP development and an awesome site to boot), had mentioned that:
RequestAction gets a lot of bad press, even from myself. But it is a tool that is very useful if used well. With that said, it is far too easy to abuse. I’ve seen code that uses requestAction to ‘post’ data to a different controller after the view has rendered. This is one of the reasons that requestAction() gets so much bad press. The other is the additional hit on the server. Now the additional hit isn’t as bad if you use array urls as the route parsing is skipped. If your two controller actions share many of the same models, you will just be getting the models out of the ClassRegistry which isn’t as big of a hit as it is sometimes made out to be. So there are ways to squeeze additional performance out of requestAction.
P.S. Original thread that started it all: http://groups.google.com/group/cake-php/browse_thread/thread/701333f4c6654a49/4ceabc4bb9570297
