Chained Actions with Dancer

Sometimes, I can be slow on the uptake.

A few days ago, had you asked me one big plus of Catalyst over Dancer, I would have said “chained actions”. Chained actions allow to split the logic underlaying an uri into smaller components associated with its segments. A very neat, DRY-friendly ways of doing things.

For example, say that I have a course subscription web service with the uris ‘/user/name/courses’, ‘/user/name/course/course_id/subscribe’ and ‘/user/name/course/course_id/is_subscribed’. With Catalyst, its controller’s actions could look like:

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But then, I discovered Dancer’s ‘pass’ directive. And I saw the light. With Dancer, the chained behavior described above could be done with:

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Granted, it’s not as clean as it could be; while writing this example I discovered that ’prefix’ doesn’t play very well with regex-based routes (darn!), and we’re missing a megasplat character to be able to do

get '/user/**' => sub {
        # for '/user/bob/course/bar' 
        # @splatters = qw/ bob course bar /
    my @splatters = splat;  
};

but that isn’t anything that a patch or two won’t solve. The point is that not only we can have chained actions, but we are not limited to linear chains. Our action endpoint can have as many overlapping intermediary routes as we want. For example, we can have more than one instance of the same route for different pieces of logic:

get qr!/user/[^/]+/course/([^/]+)! => sub {
    var course => (splat)[0];
    pass;
};

get qr!/user/[^/]+/course/[^/]+! => sub {
    # somebody's interested? better get organized
    $teacher{ $vars->{course} } ||= $profs[ rand @profs ];

    pass;
};

And, of course, since the power of regular expressions is at our fingertips, we can also have any type of laterally-injected piece of funkiness we can dream off:

get qr!/user/([^/]+)/course/\1/! => sub {
    var homonym_discount => 1;
    pass;
};

As I said up top, this is probably old news for lots of people, but for me it’s a big piece of the puzzle falling into place. One that fills me with mirth. And maybe more than just a tad of nefarious glee. Me has a new toy to abuse. Wheeeee!