Let me start with a simple example to show how my data is structured. There are four tables, Employee, Store, Department, and Employee_Department_Permissions.
Departments belong to Stores (for example, the Department table might contain a record for the dairy department of store 5). Employees are given the right to work in Departments through the Employee_Department_Permissions table, which contains the Employee id and Department id.
Let’s say an employee can log in to my application and view a list of every store in the database. Next to each store, I want to print out how many departments they can work in at each store. I have an Employee model with a mapper that provides the fetchAll method to accomplish the first part.
But, where should I find out how many departments an employee can work in? In my model wrapper, I can call findDependentRows to do this. Or, I could do it in my controller with raw Zend_Db_Select calls. A third option I was considering would to be just add a column to the Employee table that holds this information, but then I’d need to update a second table when Employee_Department_Permission is modified.
Thank you in advance for any advice.
As a very general rule of thumb, I would suggest you try keep the controller as free as possible from fetching information for the views. This is a task best handled in the model.
Sure it’s easy to just fetch from controller, I mean, since we are there processing a request, it would be so simple to just do a quick fetch and push that off to the view. This is where dicipline comes into play. As your application grows you will appreciate having the clean separation this methodology offers you if applied.
My 2 cents, happy coding to you friend.