Question

We had an outsourced engineer work on a quick feature DELETING items listed in our database. He says that the code is difficult because the “controller” is missing. Is there a pre-loaded controller for every function like that in cake, or is it weird that he is expecting a controller to be there for a feature we didn’t have yet.

Answer 1

There is a generic AppController, but that’s more of an abstract class in practice (you generally derive your other controllers from that).

It’s not that weird at all that he’s expecting a controller — after all, you won’t be able to call methods in the models (which is how I’m guessing you’re doing delete) unless you have a point of control to call them from. In this case, the point of control is the controller.

So you can just create a controller. Here’s a template to start from:

class SomeController extends AppController {
 function delete() {
  $this->Some->delete();
 }
}

Then access /somes/delete (remember, URLs are generally /controller/action).

Now, he could be talking about the Cake Bake CLI app. That will take your DB tables, and walk you through an initial basic setup for your app. Generally it creates a basic skeleton for CRUD actions.

Either way, you need to create a controller (manually, or via Bake).