Using __call() in your controller to render magic content.
Saturday, December 6th, 2008I was writing a basic CMS-type system and I was getting a bit annoyed with long urls, ie: /index/content/page/something, when I really just wanted /content/something – so I thought to myself, “self, why don’t you use __call() and just magically handle the incoming actions?
Well, self, that was a brilliant idea.
function __call($method, $params)
{
Zend_Loader::loadClass('Zend_Filter_Inflector');
$inflector = new Zend_Filter_Inflector(':action');
$inflector->setRules(array(
':action' => array('Word_CamelCaseToDash', 'StringToLower'),
));
$magicAction = str_replace('-action', '',
$inflector->filter(array(':action' => $method)));
/* TODO: lookup the magicAction in the cms table
* replace in_array with a check for the db_row
* remove $magicArray
*/
$magicArray = array('in-person', 'custom-experience');
if (in_array($magicAction, $magicArray)) {
// we have a record
$this->render('magic-content');
} else {
// no record, use my magic 404 thrower.
$this->fileNotFound();
}
}
And with that, any of non-existent actions requested in my controller will be looked up in a db, then rendered using a common view script. Pretty simple, really.