Examples

Controllers

Accessing the Request and Response

When using AbstractActionController or AbstractRestfulController, the request and response object are composed directly into the controller as soon as dispatch() is called. You may access them in the following ways:

// Using explicit accessor methods
$request  = $this->getRequest();
$response = $this->getResponse();

// Using direct property access
$request  = $this->request;
$response = $this->response;

Additionally, if your controller implements InjectApplicationEventInterface (as both AbstractActionController and AbstractRestfulController do), you can access these objects from the attached MvcEvent:

$event    = $this->getEvent();
$request  = $event->getRequest();
$response = $event->getResponse();

The above can be useful when composing event listeners into your controller.

Accessing routing parameters

The parameters returned when routing completes are wrapped in a Zend\Mvc\Router\RouteMatch object. This object is detailed in the section on Routing.

Within your controller, if you implement InjectApplicationEventInterface (as both AbstractActionController and AbstractRestfulController do), you can access this object from the attached MvcEvent:

$event   = $this->getEvent();
$matches = $event->getRouteMatch();

Once you have the RouteMatch object, you can pull parameters from it.

The same can be done using the Params plugin.

Returning early

You can effectively short-circuit execution of the application at any point by returning a Response from your controller or any event. When such a value is discovered, it halts further execution of the event manager, bubbling up to the Application instance, where it is immediately returned.

As an example, the Redirect plugin returns a Response, which can be returned immediately so as to complete the request as quickly as possible. Other use cases might be for returning JSON or XML results from web service endpoints, returning “401 Unauthorized” results, etc.

Bootstrapping

Registering module-specific listeners

Often you may want module-specific listeners. As an example, this would be a simple and effective way to introduce authorization, logging, or caching into your application.

Each Module class can have an optional onBootstrap() method. Typically, you’ll do module-specific configuration here, or setup event listeners for you module here. The onBootstrap() method is called for every module on every page request and should only be used for performing lightweight tasks such as registering event listeners.

The base Application class shipped with the framework has an EventManager associated with it, and once the modules are initialized, it triggers the bootstrap event, with a getApplication() method on the event.

So, one way to accomplish module-specific listeners is to listen to that event, and register listeners at that time. As an example:

namespace SomeCustomModule;

class Module
{
    /**
     * @param  \Zend\Mvc\MvcEvent $e The MvcEvent instance
     * @return void
     */
    public function onBootstrap($e)
    {
        $application = $e->getApplication();
        $config      = $application->getConfig();
        $view        = $application->getServiceManager()->get('ViewHelperManager');
        // You must have these keys in you application config
        $view->headTitle($config['view']['base_title']);

        // This is your custom listener
        $listener   = new Listeners\ViewListener();
        $listener->setView($view);
        $application->getEventManager()->attachAggregate($listener);
    }
}

The above demonstrates several things. First, it demonstrates a listener on the application’s bootstrap event (the onBootstrap() method). Second, it demonstrates that listener, and how it can be used to register listeners with the application. It grabs the Application instance; from the Application, it is able to grab the attached service manager and configuration. These are then used to retrieve the view, configure some helpers, and then register a listener aggregate with the application event manager.