I want to employ CakePHP’s basic caching functionality on my site’s home page. However, there is one element on the page that should display different data depending on the visitor’s location, as determined by their IP address.
You can’t wrap <cake:nocache> around variables that are set in the controller, which is where I was previously determining the location and getting the data. My question therefore is: where can I optimally set a (session?) variable to contain visitor location information before the controller? How can I use this information to populate an array of data for the nocached portion of the view, while completely sidestepping the controller action, which is no longer being called?
Any advice greatly appreciated!
Hmm, well, apparently CakePHP questions aren’t of much interest to the world at large: only 8 views in 2 days 🙁
In any case I investigated a bit further and discovered that, while the <nocache> tags don’t let you surround variables to make them dynamic, they DO allow you to make non-caching calls to elements or helpers. I therefore extracted the relevant part of my page into an element, and populated the data array by calling a helper function.
This did mean that I had to access the model from inside the helper with
and I’m not sure this is necessarily the respectful CakePHP and/or MVC way of doing things, but at least it’s some way towards a solution!