Separate server response from controllers

[Jon]

Continuing on my theme of testability, another item to think about and possibly implement. Your controllers will do one of two things:

• Echo HTML to standard output
• Use header() to perform a redirect and exit

I would suggest that instead you:

• Return a Laconia\WebResponse object

You can call this whatever you like, but to wire it in, I'd do this in your controller:

public function setWebResponse(Laconia\WebResponse $webResponse) {
    $this->webResponse = $webResponse;
}

I'd then modify view to inject the HTML it generates into the WebResponse (to capture HTML in a variable rather than printing it immediately, use output buffering).

The web response could look a bit like this:

namespace Laconia;

class WebResponse {
    protected $isOutput = false;
    protected $isRedirect = false;
    protected $output;
    protected $redirect;

    public function setOutput($output) {
        $this->isOutput = true;
        $this->output = $output;
    }

    public function setRedirect($redirect) {
        $this->isRedirect = true;
        $this->redirect = $redirect;
    }

    public function execute() {
        if ($this->isOutput) {
            echo $this->output;
        } elseif ($this->isRedirect) {
            header($this->redirect);
        }
    }
}

Woop! That is much better for testing. It is, specifically, better for mocking, so we can pass a fake object during testing, to see what things get called on it.

[Tania Rascia]

I'm going to close these tickets and handle any testing related optimizations in the testing issue.

[Jon]

No worries. I think I might have promised to do some examples, and never got around to it - if so, apologies! I promise more than my time management skills will allow ;-)

Hope your current projects are going well.

[Tania Rascia]

Haha, no worries! I appreciated the input and help. I've just shifted my focus to other projects and don't think I'll get around to those optimizations so it was better to close them.

[Jon]

No problem. I am still doing PHP, but I am trying to learn JavaScript now. I'm building a little microservices project with React and Express, and there is fair bit to juggle...