Avoid large switch statement in frontcontroller

Question

I have a larger application with a Frontcontroller in php that handles incoming ajax requests. I am thinking about a good way to handle Action->Method mapping, this controller is in charge of instantiating other classes and executing methods there.

The switch is just getting too big and it's ugly. I was thinking about creating an array and simply doing:

if(in_array($action, $methodmap)){
  $methodmap[$action]();
}

But not sure of how efficient that would be or if there are any other better alternatives, performance is important since this controller handles a whole lot of incoming requests.

Thanks!

You would use `isset()` in place of `in_array()`. And the speed difference of a hash map over a switch is [possibly even measureable](http://xdebug.org/docs/profiler). — mario, Jan 28 '12 at 16:29

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

2

You could create a simple routing system.

index.php

<?php

class InvalidClassException extends Exception {}
function autoloader($class)
{
    $path = 'controllers/'.$class.'.php';
    if (!ctype_alnum($class) || !file_exists($path))
        throw new InvalidClassException("Couldn't find '$class'");
    require($path);
}
spl_autoload_register('autoloader');

$request = isset($_GET['request'])?$_GET['request']:'front';
$controller = new $request();
$controller->index();

And a directory controllers/ where you store all your controllers. E.g.

controllers/test1.php

<?php

class Test1
{
    public function index()
    {
        print "Test 1";
    }
}

When accessing index.php?request=test1, Test1->index() would be called, thus output

Test 1

edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

Community

1
1

answered Jan 28 '12 at 16:43

kba

19,333
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I am all for doing that, however the reason I have not done that is this: http://pooteeweet.org/blog/538 , I don't know how true that is to this day, but isn't it true that with __autoload you are basically out of luck with apc and similar opcode caches? – neph Jan 28 '12 at 16:46
@neph Nope, APC will work just fine. See http://stackoverflow.com/a/1396538/453331 – kba Jan 28 '12 at 16:53
`__autoload()` is "a kind of" deprecated. You should use `spl_autoload_register()`, which works quite similar and (at the end) does exactly the same. – KingCrunch Jan 28 '12 at 17:01

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 28 '12 at 16:28

0

TRy using a "routing" configuration file instead... that way, you can add new routings to the application without needing to change the actual action/method mapping code

answered Jan 28 '12 at 16:28

Mark Baker

209,507
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385

Avoid large switch statement in frontcontroller

2 Answers2

index.php

controllers/test1.php