Question

I am designing a web application with a left sidebar. Each of my actions has its own widgets which must be loaded into the sidebar, and in some cases multiple actions are stacked using the Action Stack plugin. When all actions have finished running I need to ‘normalise’ and manipulate the number of widgets, then render them.

At this stage I am thinking that:

• Each action should store its list of sidebar widgets with the view, and
• A front controller plug-in with a dispatch loop shutdown event should take the list from the view and operate on it

Does this sound reasonable? Is there a better way?

I wondered whether I should be storing the list of sidebar widgets with the response object directly, but I don’t think this object allows user variables, does it?

Your thoughts are much appreciated! Yeehhaa!

Answer 1

Ok, so I ended up defining a list of widgets in an array for each controller, then modifying it where required in each action. But now I am in the process of moving more logic into the model, so no doubt will all change.

I have been reading about the evils of the ActionStack and now that I have my head around how to go about things without the action stack, life is much simpler!