MVC

Table of content

• MVC
• Table of content
• About
• Template engines
• BaseController
• ApiController
• Router
• Wiring it together with the DI container
• Testing

About

GuiBranco\Pancake\MVC adds a small MVC layer to the toolkit: controllers that render views or JSON, and a Router that dispatches requests to them. Controllers are resolved through DIContainer, so their dependencies (starting with the template engine) are wired automatically.

Template engines

GuiBranco\Pancake\MVC\TemplateEngineInterface is the contract controllers render through:

interface TemplateEngineInterface
{
    public function render(string $view, array $data = []): string;
}

DefaultTemplateEngine is the built-in implementation: it resolves a dot-separated view name (e.g. "users.profile") to a plain PHP file ({$viewsPath}/users/profile.php), extracts $data as local variables, and captures the file's output. It throws GuiBranco\Pancake\Exceptions\ViewNotFoundException when the resolved file doesn't exist.

use GuiBranco\Pancake\MVC\DefaultTemplateEngine;

$engine = new DefaultTemplateEngine(__DIR__ . '/views');
echo $engine->render('greeting', ['name' => 'World']); // views/greeting.php
echo $engine->render('users.profile', ['username' => 'gui']); // views/users/profile.php

To use Twig, Mustache, Plates, or any other engine instead, implement TemplateEngineInterface around it and register that implementation in the container (see below) — no other code needs to change.

BaseController

BaseController renders views through the injected template engine and offers a redirect() helper.

use GuiBranco\Pancake\MVC\BaseController;

class HomeController extends BaseController
{
    public function index(): void
    {
        $this->render('home', ['title' => 'Welcome']);
    }
}

ApiController

ApiController extends BaseController and overrides render() to always emit JSON instead of a templated view (the $view argument is accepted only to keep the same method signature and is otherwise ignored):

use GuiBranco\Pancake\MVC\ApiController;

class DataController extends ApiController
{
    public function index(): void
    {
        $this->render('unused', ['status' => 'ok']);
        // Content-Type: application/json
        // {"status":"ok"}
    }
}

Router

Router maps an HTTP method + path to a controller/action pair, and dispatches by resolving the controller through a PSR-11 container — DIContainer or any other compatible implementation.

use GuiBranco\Pancake\MVC\Router;

$router = new Router();
$router->add('GET', '/home', HomeController::class, 'index');
$router->add('GET', '/api/data', DataController::class, 'index');

$router->dispatch($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'], $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], $container);

Matching ignores the request's query string and a trailing slash, and treats the HTTP method case-insensitively. Unmatched routes get a 404 response with a Page not found body.

Wiring it together with the DI container

Register the template engine once; controllers that depend on TemplateEngineInterface are autowired without any registration of their own.

use GuiBranco\Pancake\DIContainer;
use GuiBranco\Pancake\MVC\DefaultTemplateEngine;
use GuiBranco\Pancake\MVC\Router;
use GuiBranco\Pancake\MVC\TemplateEngineInterface;

$container = new DIContainer();
$container->registerSingleton(TemplateEngineInterface::class, function () {
    return new DefaultTemplateEngine(__DIR__ . '/views');
});

$router = new Router();
$router->add('GET', '/home', HomeController::class, 'index');
$router->add('GET', '/api/data', DataController::class, 'index');

$router->dispatch($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'], $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], $container);

Register a controller explicitly instead when it needs something beyond autowiring — a specific constructor argument, an interface the container can't guess an implementation for, etc.:

$container->registerTransient(DataController::class, function ($c) {
    return new DataController($c->get(TemplateEngineInterface::class), $c->get('config'));
});

Testing

See tests/Unit/MVC/ and tests/Integration/MVC/MvcIntegrationTest.php.