I am new to Joomla component developement and currently fighting with certain basic design patterns! Lets say, I am developing a component where users can enter simple notes into their personal notebooks.
On calling the view "index.php?option=com_notebook&view=notes" I simply show a list of all note entries of the user. No problem so far, this is working fine.
Now I want to extend my component with the following feature: on opening the view "index.php?option=com_notebook&view=notes", I want to check if the user has already created a notebook before. If yes, I show all note entries, if not, I want to load a different view which contains a form to create a new notebook with certain options.
But how can this be done in a clean way? For sure, I just can implement the form within the view "notes", but this is not the clean way, isnt it? I also tried to override the function "display()" of the main controller and set the view manually if no notebook exists. But if I do so, I have to handle all calls to other views of my component manually within the function "display()". To solve this, I created a copy the original implementation from the class "JControllerLegacy" and changed it to my needs - this is working - but is this really the best way to handle problems like this?
So I ask you, what is the best approach to solve this problem? Thx a lot!
