ThinkUp does not use an MVC framework, but it does employ the Model-View-Controller design pattern. The Wikipedia page makes the idea sound confusing to new comers so here’s a basic run down of what the MVC design pattern is and how ThinkUp uses it.
The idea behind the MVC design pattern is to separate programming logic from the presentation of an application. Ever embedded large amounts of HTML in strings concatenated with lots of variables? The MVC pattern is the solution to that problem.
Under the MVC design pattern, an application will have 3 specific types of component: models, views and controllers. Models are designed to take data and process it, views are designed to take processed data and display it, and controllers are designed to decide what data gets processed by which model and which view is used to display it.
In our case:
As mentioned before, all controllers in the ThinkUp application extend either ThinkUpController or ThinkUpAuthController. The reason for this is that both of those classes provide a lot of the nitty gritty code that goes into keeping the user interface consistent and secure so that you don’t have to. They also have a few cool tricks up their sleeves.
If you extend the ThinkUpAuthController, for example, your user will need to be logged in to access the page. If they are not logged in, the page realises this and displays an appropriate, consistent error message. You, as the developer, do not need to worry about handling guest users trying to access your page.
The ThinkUpController class also handles the template that you want to use. Setting a template and sending data to the template is all handled for you and abstracted into a handful of easy to use methods that I will explain in more detail in the next section.
Remember those cool tricks I mentioned earlier? One of them is profiling. If you turn on profiling in your config file, the controllers are what handle that. All of the queries that you make get logged by the classes that access the database and the controller automatically displays them at the bottom of the page. Cool, right?
Writing your own controller is really easy. All you need to do is extend either ThinkUpController or ThinkUpAuthController and override a method called control (). The control method is an abstract method inside ThinkUpController (ThinkUpAuthController extends ThinkUpController) that gets called as part of the go () method. So as the page is generated, the control () method is called to allow you to do all of the processing that you need to do, then the controller uses the data that you processed to generate the page that gets displayed to the user.
We know that a view is what presents data to us in to a front end user interface, but how does it achieve this? Enter Smarty.
ThinkUp uses a templating engine called Smarty. Smarty is a very versatile and very easy to use templating engine that allows a developer to send key=value pairs to a .tpl file that contains HTML code (and possibly some Smarty syntax that you can read about on their site). Let’s take a look at the UpdateNowController class.
The UpdateNowController class is quite small and will tell you just about everything you need to know about the basics of how controllers send data to views. You will see a line in this controller that looks like this: $this->setViewTemplate (‘crawler.updatenow.tpl’);. This is an important line of code and needs to be present in all of the controllers you write; it tells the controller which view to use. You will notice in the views folder that there is a file called crawler.updatenow.tpl. This is the view that the UpdateNowController uses.
About half way down the crawler.updatenow.tpl file you will see this line of code
<iframe width="850" height="500" src="run.php{if $log == 'full'}?log=full{/if}" style="border:solid black 1px">
Notice the strange “if” statement in {curly braces}? That’s Smarty syntax. It’s telling the page that if the $log variable equals the string “full”, print ?log=full to the page. But where did the $log variable come from? Near the bottom of UpdateNowController you will see this line of code: $this->addToView (‘log’, ‘full’);. This is how controllers pass key=value pairs to Smarty templates.
That just about covers the basics. If you have any further questions don’t hesitate to ping the mailing list.