Magento – Controller _forward and Full Page Cache

controllersfull-page-cache

I found an interesting workaround for an issue I was having; not sure if it's best-practice, but I was wondering if someone could explain to me how this works:

  • I needed to provide a check on postdispatch for a category load
  • Created an observer, inspect the Mage::registry('current_category')
  • If the category matches the category in question, I do some getStoreConfig inspection to a custom module, and based on the return, I either do nothing (let the request sail through) or redirect to another page

What I found is that with Enterprise Full Page Cache enabled, my postdispatch event was never firing.

Which raises the question:

http://cdn.meme.li/i/o5acb.jpg

My solution:

In my custom module's controller I created a new action which effectively just calls $this->_forward() to the category as before. But now, instead of FPC intercepting my event, the event is fired correctly.

My question:

Is this poor practice?

Is there a better suggested workaround?

It seems less "hacky" than fully disabling FPC for the category in question… though that may have been the actual result of the _forward. The end-user experience is seamless and all category features work as-expected from there including pagination, layered navigation.

Best Answer

I think it is better to do it next way:

  1. Create observer on post dispatch

  2. Check there if category matches the category in question - set no_cache param into the request:

        $request = $observer->getEvent()->getControllerAction()->getRequest();
    $request->setParam('no_cache', true);

(see Enterprise_PageCache_Model_Observer::checkCategoryState()). So, only categories which should be redirected won't be cached by FPC.

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