Re: [Webware-devel] Page.handlePostWithoutAction()

[Ian B. <ia...@co...>]

On Tue, 2002-10-08 at 22:39, Matthew J. Feifarek wrote:
> I love the actions stuff in WebKit; and I think that EVERY transaction 
> should really have an action; basically, each transaction is calling a 
> method of an object. Why should the "writeHTML" be any different?

I myself never use actions, though kind of for this reason -- I have a
hard time arranging the logic when actions are sometimes called, and
sometimes not.  My solution has been not to use actions at all.

> This really started to seem obvious to me as I worked on security checks 
> for a "UserAccountKit" that we're working with, and had to do all the 
> security checks twice: once for actions, and once in the writeHTML tree 
> of methods.

BTW, I've been using an alternate Page-like servlet structure (which I
haven't put in CVS or anything -- but maybe I should put it in
Experimental).  Anyway, it makes much more significant use of
exceptions.  I have a feeling it would simplify what you are doing,
since at any point you could raise a Forbidden exception.  In general
I've found that cleaner than doing security through if statements.

> I would support an architectural change that made EVERY transaction an 
> action... it would be great; we'd get preAction(), postAction() and the 
> main action() for every transaction; which among other things would 
> allow us to leave awake() and sleep() for the WebKit internals (or 
> superclass internals). If the default action just called an output 
> method, so be it.

Do you mean that, if no explicit _action_ was given, you'd do something
like handleAction('default') (and skip writeHTML entirely, but the
default action would call writeHTML by default)?

  Ian