[Catalyst] Something odd with chained actions

[Matt S Trout]

Nilson Santos Figueiredo Junior wrote:
> On 7/10/06, Robert 'phaylon' Sedlacek <phaylon at dunkelheit.at> wrote:
>> Yes, 'Chained' takes the private action name. The whole chain creates a
>> publich path. From the docs:
>>
>>   "The Chained attribute allows you to chain public path parts
>>    together by their private names."
> 
> Hmmm... right. Then it's a little less powerful than I thought, I guess.

No, it's more powerful than you thought :)

Tying it to the PathPart means you're back to being tied to your URI map; this 
way if marketing suddenly decide to rename 'products' to 'XPeriences' and 
require this to be in the URL, providing you're using $c->uri_for($action, 
...) everywhere all you have to do is change one :PathPart statement (which 
can even be done from config) and the job's complete.

Also, you can quite happily have an action with :PathPart('') which can be 
extremely handy (for e.g. an app where the first path part is the language, or 
the username ala livejournal, or whatever)

> If they were chained by their respective PathParts then you could have
> many different chain roots, each possibly accepting a different number
> arguments, which would be followed by the same endpoint. Thus,
> reusability would be improved.

Controller subclassing will handle this fine.

> But I didn't really use it yet so I can't really tell if, in practice,
> this feature would prove itself useful or not. Right now, it seemed to
> be (at least for me).

The feature's there. You just tried to get at it the wrong way :)

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