Question

Let’s say that a Human can have Item(s) inside his pocket. Each Item has different effect on the Human.

When he use an item, it goes to ItemController :

class ItemController extends Controller
{
    public function useAction() {
       // Human
        $human = new Human();

       // Item
        $request = Request::createFromGlobals();
        $item_id = $request->request->get('item_id', 0);
        $item = new Item($item_id);

        // Different effects depending on the Item used
        switch($item->getArticleId()) {

            case 1: $this->heal($human, $item, 5); break; // small potion
            case 2: $this->heal($human, $item, 10); break; // medium potion
            case 3: $this->heal($human, $item, 15); break; // big potion

        }

    }

    // The following Heal Function can be placed here ?
    private function heal($human, $item, $life_points) {
        $human->addLife($life_points);
        $item->remove();
        return new Response("You have been healed of $life_points");
    }
}

Does the heal function can be placed here ? I believe that it’s not supposed to be in the Controller. But I also believe it should not be placed inside the Item Entity (because of the Response, and because it uses $Human)

Answer 1

It depends. My reasoning for these type of questions is this: if I’ll only use the function in the controller, it can stay there. But if it’s likely to be a shared function, I’ll create a service for it. Maybe you want to be able to heal humans via a command, or a different controller or something. In that case it makes sense to use shared code for this.

Creating a service is really easy, and enables you to keep logic in a shared place. In my opinion the controller is more useful to handle the request flow.