Question

So I wrote my PHP MVC framework, and have Dispatcher class that can instantiate appropriate Controller class and call defined method passing arguments.

Now inside Dispatcher I check if this Controller exists and if method exists, what should I do if controller or method does not exist?

At the moment I just return HTTP Object that prints 404 – Page not found.
But there is no way for me to customize this message from inside application, and I want to provide users a way to customize 404 messages without editing dispatcher.

Is a good way to go to always have Error controller that would get instantiated when there is a error, and that would load lets say Error404.html view file?
So users would be able to customize this view file to fit their application design.

Is there any other way to achive this? And what would be the best way to return error from dispatcher, and let “users” or developers that are working on that MVC to easily customize 404 and other messages?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I would propose you have an error controller that takes in an error code (number or string) as an argument. This allows you to gracefully handle various kinds of errors and be able to provide a stack trace if necessary. You can even utilize this work for 500 errors.

My answer comes with the assumption that a controller can return various actions and each action can have it’s own template.

Symfony also seems to handle errors in a similar fashion. They have a separate module and action for each error.

sfContext::getInstance()->getController()->forward(sfConfig::get('sf_error_404_m‌​odule'), sfConfig::get('sf_error_404_action'));