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In one of my Catalyst actions, I'm trying to go off and get the body response (HTML) of another action in a different controller. (For the purpose of sort of "embedding" one page in another)

I figured the way to do this was a $c->visit. (If I misunderstood $c->visit, then the rest of my question need not be answered.)

The action in question takes an arg, but not until further down the chain, which looks like this:

/equipment/*/assets/widget


/assets/captureID (1)
-> /assets/base (0)
-> /assets/pageData (0)
=> /assets/widget

As you can see, only the last action in the chain is looking for an arg.

If I try:

$c->visit('/assets/widget',[$arg]);

I would expect it to travel down the chain and give /assets/captureID my $arg. But in fact, it doesn't seem to get passed down the chain at all.

Where have I gone astray?

Ryan
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2 Answers2

1

Turns out only the captures, not the args get passed down the chain.

According to the doc:

$c->visit( $action [, \@captures, \@arguments ] )

So I was able to have success by doing the following:

$c->visit('/assets/widget',[$arg],[$arg])

The first array of args hits the first action and stops, but the second array travels all the way down the chain like I wanted.

I expected $c->visit('/assets/widget',[],[$arg]) to work, but it does not.

However, after all that I realized I can't just grab the body response that way, which was the ultimate goal. Either way, hopefully my goose chase was helpful to someone.

Ryan
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1

As you've discovered, the body doesn't exist at that point. You'd have to have made a call to render your view, or make an arrangement for /assets/widget to set $c->res->body($foo) directly. I find the idea of capturing the body of a sub-request unconventional, to put it mildly. I can't imagine what you are going to do with it that isn't going to go against the principles of good MVC design.

It sounds to me like the logic that is in /assets/widget needs to be located in the Model rather than the Controller, so that it can be used by whatever function requires it.

And/or you need to break your templates down into (reusable) components, so that whatever content you planned to embed could be done as part of a single rendering process.

[%- IF foo;
        PROCESS widget.tt;
    END; -%]
RET
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