Controllers¶

What is a Controller?¶

A controller is used to manage the logic for a part of your application. Most commonly, controllers are used to manage the logic for a single model. For example, if you were building a site for an online bakery, you might have a RecipesController and a IngredientsController managing your recipes and their ingredients. In CakePHP, controllers are named after the model they handle, in plural form.

The Recipe model is handled by the RecipesController, the Product model is handled by the ProductsController, and so on.

Your application’s controllers are classes that extend the CakePHP AppController class, which in turn extends a core Controller class, which are part of the CakePHP library. The AppController class can be defined in /app/Controller/AppController.php and it should contain methods that are shared between all of your application’s controllers.

Controllers can include any number of methods which are usually referred to as actions. Actions are controller methods used to display views. An action is a single method of a controller.

CakePHP’s dispatcher calls actions when an incoming request matches a URL to a controller’s action (refer to “Routes Configuration” for an explanation on how controller actions and parameters are mapped from the URL).

Code¶

Returning to our online bakery example, our RecipesController might contain the view(), share(), and search() actions. The controller would be found in /app/Controller/RecipesController.php:

<?php
class RecipesController extends AppController {

    public function view($id)     {
        //action logic goes here..
    }

    public function share($customer_id, $recipe_id) {
        //action logic goes here..
    }

    public function search($query) {
        //action logic goes here..
    }

}

How to see it in action?¶

Controllers can be accessed from your browser from the address yoursite.com/controller_name/action_name. But it will show errors now, and we will require to create models and views for it too.