Need another way to extract data to display in Cakephp view

Question

I have tables from a previous custom cms migrated to cakephp. The models, controllers, views, helpers have been created and I can get them to work now. However, I have a bit of a problem with rendering the text fields.

The text from the original tables contained markup codes that need to be parsed so that they can be displayed properly. I've made a helper for this and so far it can parse most of the markup codes now. Left with doing the parsing for nested lists and codes which look like this:

{img src="showImage.php?xxxx" alt="" link=""} where xxxx is the id in the images table.

From the previous system, this actually makes calls to the images table and lookup the actual url of the image so that it can be displayed and there can be quite a few of these codes in a record. The helper can extract the image ids but from what I understand in Cakephp, views and helpers are mostly for rendering data already retrieved by the controllers. If this is the case then it seems I won't be able to make calls to the images table and pass those image ids to get what I need to display the images or rather it's not recommended. Now I'm a bit lost as to where to put the code to get the image data if helpers cannot call on controllers.

Sorry, Cake newbie here and still learning how to use cake properly so if you can just point me to the correct direction -- where to put the code or maybe if I need to create a plugin or component or anything -- will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You can use requestAction() for that in your helper. I would not call it the perfect solution even if the performance of requestAction() is ok but this way you'll have to make one db query per image, pretty inefficient and this should not happen in the view layer. Request action will request, as the name implies, a controller action and the action has to return data.

If you want to go for a true MVC violation you could also just ClassRegistry::init() the image model and fetch the records directly using the model instance in the view. But that's bad practice.

Now what I would consider the proper solution that respects MVC. :) Instead you could use the Model::afterFind() callback, extract here all image ids and do a find('all') with the set of ids you extracted and add them to the result. The advantage here is a single query for all images.

Best practice would be to have a separate method like extractImageIds() and call that from afterFind(). This way it's logically separated and can also be tested better than stuck with other things in afterSave().

If you have plans to refactor this legacy image handling I've also written a plugin that takes care of proper abstract file storage and image processing.