I am using MVC in PHP based Zend Framework. This is more of a design question. I have a controller that has a couple of actions. These actions are accessed via AJAX from the controller's view. The controller's actions, perform Business logic by accessing data from functions inside a model, and construct or echo HTML. This HTML is spit back to view in the AJAX response. My understanding of controllers is they are not supposed to contain any HTML at all. But given the AJAX in the views, I feel I don't have a choice except to generate HTML on the fly in the controller. Is this a good design? How can I improve it?
Php – Controllers and Views – MVC in Zend Framework
model-view-controllerPHPzend-framework
Related Solutions
Model-View-Presenter
In MVP, the Presenter contains the UI business logic for the View. All invocations from the View delegate directly to the Presenter. The Presenter is also decoupled directly from the View and talks to it through an interface. This is to allow mocking of the View in a unit test. One common attribute of MVP is that there has to be a lot of two-way dispatching. For example, when someone clicks the "Save" button, the event handler delegates to the Presenter's "OnSave" method. Once the save is completed, the Presenter will then call back the View through its interface so that the View can display that the save has completed.
MVP tends to be a very natural pattern for achieving separated presentation in WebForms. The reason is that the View is always created first by the ASP.NET runtime. You can find out more about both variants.
Two primary variations
Passive View: The View is as dumb as possible and contains almost zero logic. A Presenter is a middle man that talks to the View and the Model. The View and Model are completely shielded from one another. The Model may raise events, but the Presenter subscribes to them for updating the View. In Passive View there is no direct data binding, instead, the View exposes setter properties that the Presenter uses to set the data. All state is managed in the Presenter and not the View.
- Pro: maximum testability surface; clean separation of the View and Model
- Con: more work (for example all the setter properties) as you are doing all the data binding yourself.
Supervising Controller: The Presenter handles user gestures. The View binds to the Model directly through data binding. In this case, it's the Presenter's job to pass off the Model to the View so that it can bind to it. The Presenter will also contain logic for gestures like pressing a button, navigation, etc.
- Pro: by leveraging data binding the amount of code is reduced.
- Con: there's a less testable surface (because of data binding), and there's less encapsulation in the View since it talks directly to the Model.
Model-View-Controller
In the MVC, the Controller is responsible for determining which View to display in response to any action including when the application loads. This differs from MVP where actions route through the View to the Presenter. In MVC, every action in the View correlates with a call to a Controller along with an action. In the web, each action involves a call to a URL on the other side of which there is a Controller who responds. Once that Controller has completed its processing, it will return the correct View. The sequence continues in that manner throughout the life of the application:
Action in the View -> Call to Controller -> Controller Logic -> Controller returns the View.
One other big difference about MVC is that the View does not directly bind to the Model. The view simply renders and is completely stateless. In implementations of MVC, the View usually will not have any logic in the code behind. This is contrary to MVP where it is absolutely necessary because, if the View does not delegate to the Presenter, it will never get called.
Presentation Model
One other pattern to look at is the Presentation Model pattern. In this pattern, there is no Presenter. Instead, the View binds directly to a Presentation Model. The Presentation Model is a Model crafted specifically for the View. This means this Model can expose properties that one would never put on a domain model as it would be a violation of separation-of-concerns. In this case, the Presentation Model binds to the domain model and may subscribe to events coming from that Model. The View then subscribes to events coming from the Presentation Model and updates itself accordingly. The Presentation Model can expose commands which the view uses for invoking actions. The advantage of this approach is that you can essentially remove the code-behind altogether as the PM completely encapsulates all of the behavior for the view. This pattern is a very strong candidate for use in WPF applications and is also called Model-View-ViewModel.
There is a MSDN article about the Presentation Model and a section in the Composite Application Guidance for WPF (former Prism) about Separated Presentation Patterns
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)
Best Answer
There are two action helpers for doing exactly this. you can re-use your actions for multiple contexts with the ajaxContext or contextSwitch action helpers. The context switch is generally the more useful in my experience, and it can even automatically serialize the data you assign to the view in your action for json responses so there is no need for a view script.
you initialise the context switch like this:
The above will add a context of json to the context switch, and when the action is called with the request parameter 'format' set, it will automatically serialize the content, in this case giving a json array of the items returned by My_Model::fetchAll();
The format parameter can either be passed in the url "/my/index/format/json" or with a get query "/my/index?format=json"
The real magic is that the context switch also sets the appropriate headers for the response type, such as content-type.
You can even specify your own contexts, and the headers to send. Read more about the context switch here