Fumbling Toward CatalystX::Info

For once, what I’m about to blabber about is not yet on GitHub nor CPAN. See it as a promotial sneak preview. Or a merciless tease, your choice.

Recently, I’ve been dragged back to Catalyst-land. More specifically, I’ve been introduced and let loose on some fairly substantial Catalyst apps. Yayness.

Something that I’ve always liked of Catalyst is the route tables that it prints out at start time in debugging mode. Always useful, even moreso when one does try to learn the full landscape of the application. However I’ve always been irked by the fact that this reporting is intrinsically tied to the startup process and Catalyst’s logging system. What I would like to do is to extract the information of the application, without needing to have it running, and be able to do any kind of wacky stuff I can dream of with the information.

So: CatalystX::Info.

What I’ve done so far with that module ain’t high sorcery. I’m simply ripping the table-reporting guts from the core Catalyst dispatcher modules, hosing them clean and repackaging them into a neat object casing.

    use CatalystX::Info;

    my $info = CatalystX::Info->new( app => 'Gitalist' );

    for my $action ( $info->all_chained_actions ) {
        say "path: ", $action->path, " is made of ", 
            scalar( $action->segments_chain ), "segments";
        )
    }

But now that the information is organized and stuff, I can do things. Like, go through all the chained actions of an application and figure things about them.

    # let's see which routes have at least one chained element
    # in Foo::Controller::Bar

    for my $action ( $info->all_chained_actions ) {
        my @pieces = grep { $_->class eq 'Foo::Controller::Bar' } $action->segments_chain
            or next;

        say $action->path, ": ", join " ", map { 
            $_->pathpart . '()' .  $_->private_name . ')' 
        } @pieces;
    }

With that new wealth of information, we can now go just as wild with reports. For example, how about an interactive visualization of the uri tree? A little massaging, plus a mini-Dancer app using vis, and boom, here’s what happens if I look at the chained action of Gitalist:

Granted, it’s still a bit on the ugly side, but once I tidy up the graph, and color-code the segments by the controller in which they live, and tie the whole thing to the POD of said controller, and add a pretty little input box to specify a uri to be highlighted in the whole graph? Once this is done, my friends, that’s going to be one sweet Catalyst developing tool…

(to be continued)