In the past we’ve talked about implicit views in ColdBox which mean that if the action in your event handler doesn’t call setView() explicitly, ColdBox will use conventions to try and find the view to render. Well, ColdBox also supports something called Implicit View Dispatch which goes one step further and allows you to dispatch a view to the user without running any event at all.
What are the use cases? Well, perhaps you have a completely static view like a contact us page and creating a method in a handler somewhere would just be pure boilerplate. We can tell ColdBox to just send the view directly back to the user (using the default layout).
Or perhaps you’re slowly integrating ColdBox into a legacy app and you want to still serve up a legacy CFM page while using ColdBox’s routing mechanisms. Again, we can ease into ColdBox without creating handlers for all those legacy pages yet.
So, how does it work? Very simply, and unsurprisingly similar to how implicit views work. If ColdBox can’t located the package/handler or the action specified by your event, it uses a /views/[package/]handler/action.cfm convention to try and locate a view to return.
Consider a URL that looks like this:
mySite.com/index.cfm?event=contact.about
(Or the following equivalent for you people using the SES Interceptor and rewrites)
If the “contact” handler doesn’t exist, or does exist but doesn’t have an “about” action, then ColdBox will look for the following view to dispatch directly:
/views/contact/about.cfm
If you have external view locations defined, ColdBox will check them as well before finally giving up and throwing an error.
More info here: http://wiki.coldbox.org/wiki/cbl.cfm#Implicit_Views_.26_View_Dispatch
P.S. It is also possible to add SES routes that directly dispatch a view without running an event like so:
addRoute(pattern=’/AboutUs’,view=‘contact/about’);
That would make the following URL dispatch the same view as above, but with an even prettier URL:
Thanks!
~Brad
ColdBox Platform Evangelist
Ortus Solutions, Corp
E-mail: brad@coldbox.org
ColdBox Platform: http://www.coldbox.org
Blog: http://www.codersrevolution.com