REQUEST values and forwarding

[friscokid]

J2EE has the notion of a request attribute that allows you to add information to a request and forward that updated request to another servlet( A servlet is analogous to a .php). This is known as request scope and allows you to separate your controller from your view in a web mvc scenario. Is this functionality possible within php? Right now I have to add the data to the session and then retrieve it from the view.php to make this work. Obviously, this is not the way to go.

[hfuecks]

It's perfectly possible to implement that kind of functionality in PHP in a J2EE-like manner.

PHP doesn't (by default) wrap all requests in an object but rather uses global variables to make request data available, such as;

index.php?method=foo

would be available like;

<?php

echo ( $_GET['method'] ); // outputs "foo"

?>

So you could have;

<?php

echo ( "<a href=\"newpage.php?method=".$_GET['method']."&param=bar\">New Page</a>" );

?>

But for seperating controllers from views, rather than using completely seperate scripts, you could simply use PHP's OOP features. I've put together some information on MVC in PHP here.

There are also a ports of Javas MVC struts amd maverick frameworks;

http://phrame.itsd.ttu.edu/
http://amb.sourceforge.net/

Hope that helps.