CatalystX::Controller::Sugar

2009-09-10

I’ve written a module I think is rather useful: CatalystX::Controller::Sugar. This module (will hopefully) make chained actions be your default when writing a controller in Catalyst. I remember when I first started looking at Catalyst – I didn’t see the reason for doing chained actions, and I certainly didn’t understand how they worked. I still think it’s a pain to set it up, but hopefully it’s a bit easier using the sugar module.

In addition to sugar for chains, it exports some other functions, which I use most the time. This is something I think is a pain:

# 139 characters
sub foo :Chain('/') PathPart('') CaptureArgs(0) {
  my $self = shift;
  my $c = shift;
  $c->stash->{'answer_to_everything'} = 42;
}

…which can be written this way, with sugar:

# 53 characters
chain sub {
    stash answer_to_everything => 42;
};

I hardly ever use $self, but I wery often use stash(), session() and forward() so that’s why I’ve chosen to export those functions (among some others). The module is also quite simple to use:

use CatalystX::Controller::Sugar;
# your controller code
1;

…instead of:

use CatalystX::Controller;
use Moose;
BEGIN { extends 'Catalyst::Controller' }
# your controller code
1;

Does my pod suck? Is the module not flexible enough? Let me know.