Logical architecture

Basically the code is spitted in the following way:

Main application

A website is composed of a main application (stored directly in the src folder and "launched" by main.cpp), this main application will receive all the HTTP request. In the constructor we will attach to it some "sub-application" (named controllers). The main application is not used directly to display pages, it will always delegate this to a controllers.

Pre-routing phase

The goal of the main application is to do all the "before" routing actions: like for example checking that the URL is correctly formatted (for example if a website is multilingual and you have the following url schema:

http://language.domain.tld/controller/action/parameters1/parameters2 

you may want to allow users to do

http://domain.tld/controller/action/parameters1/parameters2

and to have code that redirect to the version of the website in the same language as the user's one.

Or if you change the overall url schema during the lifetime of your application, it's the main application that will be used to do the rewriting.

An other example: if your application is only to be accessed by some IPs (and if your webserver does not permit you to do so directly in the webserver configuration), you can do the check here.

Routing phase

Once this post-routing code done, the application will transfer part of URL, the cookies, sessions etc. to a controller (see the section below to more in-depth description of what is a controller). As an application has several controllers attached, the url will be used to determine which one to call.

for example considering this application with 3 controllers

• Tatowiki //main application//
  • Articles //controller//
  • Module1 //controller//
  • Pages //controller//

and the following code use to attach them:

add(articles,"^/articles(.*)",1);
add(module1,"^/module1(.*)",1);
//%%%NEXT_CONTROLLER_DISPATCHER_MARKER%%%, do not delete
add(pages, "/(.*)", 1);

then the following url

http://en.example.com/articles/show/1

will call the controller Articles and will send it the url '/show/1'

Controllers

The work flow of a controller is basically

1 The Controller is called trough the main application 2 It analyzes the URL it receives to decide which action to trigger 3 The action receives some parameters, extracted from the URL 4 Some basic checks are made to know if the user is allowed to do it 5 If so, the controller's action will initialize an instance of its dedicated Content 6 The Content will be filled using one or several of the following ways: * Using directly the parameters the action received and/or session and/or cookies * By calling a Model's action and treating the Result it returned 7 Some data may be stored/modified/deleted by calling a Model's action 8 The Content is then sent to the View that will take care of rendering it: * alternatively a redirection may be done instead 9 Optionally some post-rendering code may be executed after