Nesting Controllers

With the new routing system in Wheels 2.x, there are lots of nice features which allow for better code organization. One of these is the ability to nest controllers into folders using the namespace() method in our mapper() call.

For example, we may have a whole "Admin" section, where for each endpoint, we need to check some permissions, and possibly load some default data. Let's say we have a Users controller which provides standard CRUD operations.

app/config/routes.cfm

.mapper()
  .namespace("admin")
    .resources("users")
  .end()
.end()

This will automatically look for the Users.cfc controller in app/controllers/admin/.

By default, all your controllers extend="Controller", but with a nested controller, we need to change this, as the main Controller.cfc isn't at the same folder level.

A Handy Mapping

We've added a new mapping in 3.x, called app; This mapping will correspond to the app folder, so in our Users.cfc we now have two options - extend the core Controller.cfc via the app mapping, or perhaps extend another component (possibly Admin.cfc) which extends the core Controller instead.

app/controllers/admin/Users.cfc

component extends="app.controllers.Controller" {

  function config(){
    super.config();
  }

}

In the above example, we're using the app mapping to "go to" the app folder, and then look for a folder called controllers, and within that, our main Controller.cfc.

Our super.config() call will then run the config() function in our base Controller.

We could of course have the following too (just for completeness sake):

File system

/app/
  /controllers/
    /admin/
      - Admin.cfc
      - Users.cfc
    /public/
      - etc.

And then add the app.controllers.Controller mapping to Admin.cfc, and the extends="Admin" in the Users.cfc.

Not just controllers...

Of course, we can extend this concept (ha!) to Models too. However, this is either limited to tableless models, or models where you implicitly specify the table() call. As Wheels will look for the tablename dependent on the model file location, it'll get confused if in a sub-directory.

app/models/auth/LDAP.cfc

component extends="app.models.Model"
{
    function config() {
        table(false);
    }
    function save(){
    }
}

It also potentially makes your model() calls more complex, as you need to specify the model name in dot notation:

Example nested model call

// Example for "LDAP.cfc" in "/models/auth"
myNewLDAPModel=model("auth.LDAP").new();