Question

As mentioned in the Zend Framework manual, I created a base controller.

Subclassing the Action Controller

By design, Zend_Controller_Action must
be subclassed in order to create an
action controller. At the minimum, you
will need to define action methods
that the controller may call.

Besides creating useful functionality
for your web applications, you may
also find that you’re repeating much
of the same setup or utility methods
in your various controllers; if so,
creating a common base controller
class that extends
Zend_Controller_Action could solve
such redundancy.

But it turns out, that Exceptions are not being called properly from the base… To replicate this, create a file:

/path/to/workspace/library/Joe/Controller.php

Then:

class Joe_Controller extends Zend_Controller_Action
{
    public function init()
    {
        Throw new Zend_Exception('test', 500);
        parent::init();
    }
}

Then in your controller directory, IndexController.php extends off the base:

class IndexController extends Joe_Controller
{

You will find that the exception is uncaught.

If however, you don’t extend off the base controller, then throw an exception in init or preDispatch, it will be caught and forwarded to the ErrorController.

Anyone have an idea on getting the exceptions caught from the Base Controller?

Thanks.

UPDATING TO TACKLE THIS ANOTHER WAY

After looking at the various articles and official documentation on how to structure the directories, I went with putting the base controller in library/Joe/…but maybe that’s part of the problem…there’s no guidance in the manual on how to name and place the base controller. What do the experts with a base controller do?

Another Update

Looking at my code some more, and reading on the net, seems like people suggested in should be:

abstract class Joe_Controller_Action extends Zend_Controller_Action.

Except changing it did not solve the problem…

Now considering that there are articles suggesting to use Base Controllers including the manual, would this be considered a bug in Zend Framework?

To replicate, just throw a Zend_Exception of any kind in the base init or preDispatch. Imagine you poll the database in there, (which is what I’m doing)…and the database is down. No error controller. That’s not a good situation unless I’m doing something incorrectly.

My suspicion is that this is a new bug… I don’t recall this problem before Zend_Application and I’ve been using a base controller since ZF 1.5.

Answer 1

Two thoughts off the top of my head:

1. Controller names in the default module are usually named like SomethingController. Your name Joe_Controller suggests the module Joe and an empty controller name.

2. In routing/dispatch, doesn’t it look for a matching action before dispatch to the controller? Since the samples have no actions, might you be triggering ControllerNotFound exception?

Just throwin’ out some ideas.