Question

I have a code snippet that checks user logins and gets navigations and etc throughout the whole site. I have a few controllers and I want that snippet to be in all of them. I get tired of changing all of them one at a time whenever I change something. In one of my other projects I saw it somehow extended to the other controllers using this portion

class MyController extends Zend_Controller_Action

and it looked like

class MyController extends MySnippet_Controller_Action

or something of that sort, and it worked. I however can’t get that to work.

Answer 1

What you’re looking for is likely a frontcontroller plugin registered against init() or more likely predispatch(). In Zend Framework extending Zend_Controller_Action is frowned upon and in truth is not usually required.

these resources may help you develope the plugin(s) you need:

Understand ZF plugins pt 1
Understand ZF plugins pt 2

and of course the reference manual section

Here is the basic form of a plugin:

class My_Controller_Plugin_Acl extends Zend_Controller_Plugin_Abstract
{

    public function preDispatch(Zend_Controller_Request_Abstract $request)
    {
        parent::preDispatch($request);
        //truncated
    }
}