Mojolicious is an MVC framework. But, unlike Catalyst, Mojolicious does not provide a model API. This is a good thing: Mojolicious works well with any model layer, including the existing models used by your current application.

DBIx::Class is a popular model layer for Mojolicious applications. DBIx::Class (or "DBIC") is an Object-Relational Mapper (ORM) to map objects onto a relational database. This allows for a well-organized model layer, and a standard API to access the data.

For those who read last month's posts on Writing Reusable Controllers and Writing Extensible Controllers, this post introduces the end result of those posts: The Mojolicious DBIC Plugin. This plugin makes it easier to start using DBIx::Class with Mojolicious.

Continue reading Mojolicious and DBIx::Class...

Once I have a reusable controller, how do I extend it? Object-oriented programming gives me a couple ways of extending a controller through code: Inheritance and composition. But, we need to write our controller so that it's easy to inherit or compose.

Don't Render, Stash

First, this means we shouldn't call the render method ourselves (unless we have a good reason, but we'll get to that later). The render method can only ever be called once, so we should only call it after we've gathered all the data we want.

# This method cannot easily be used by a subclass, since it explicitly
# calls render()
sub list {
    my ( $c ) = @_;
    my $resultset_class = $c->stash( 'resultset' );
    my $resultset = $c->schema->resultset( $resultset_class );
    $c->render(
        resultset => $resultset,
    );
}

So, to make sure I don't call render too early, and to make sure subclasses can use the data from my superclass, I instead put all the data directly in to the stash with the stash() method.

Continue reading Writing Extensible Controllers...

In all the web applications I've written with Mojolicious, one of the most mis-used features are controllers. Mojolicious is a Model-View-Controller framework, and the MVC pattern is intended to provide for code re-use.

Models can be interchangeable and used by the same controllers and templates. With a common, consistent model API, the right controller can list any data, update any data. If all of our models have a method named "search", I can make a single controller method that will run a search on any of them.

The easiest way to demonstrate this is with DBIx::Class. DBIx::Class provides a consistent API for a relational database.

The Problem

For this example, I'll use this DBIx::Class schema. My schema has a couple tables: notes for storing simple notes, and events for storing calendar events.

Continue reading Writing Reusable Controllers...