Loud Baking

While working with Shells, most of the time I have some Tasks taking care of certain specific business logic each. Today, I had the need for a special Task. Special because it was actually a kinda duplicate of an existing Component, my quite useful but still incomplete to share, SerialComponent.

Like I just said, this Component is incomplete and I know that I will be making several changes in the coming month - so quickly, before thinking of duplicate code, good/bad cake or anything like that, I realized that I didn’t want to have 2 different classes to update every time. That been said, what’s coming next is my implementation of a Component inside a Task, which, I still don’t know if it makes a good or bad cake but it at least avoids most of the duplicate code. Maybe there is a better one I don’t know of that would entirely avoid that duplication but until then, the following works.

include COREPATH . ‘cake’ . DS . ‘libs’ . DS . ‘controller’ . DS . ‘component.php’;
include APPPATH . ‘controllers’ . DS . ‘components’ . DS . ’serial.php’;


class SerializerTask extends Shell
{
/**
 * Holds instance of SerialComponent
 *
 * @var     SerialComponent
 * @access  private
 */
var $_serial = null;
/**
 * Overrides the shell constructor and instantiate the SerialComponent
 *
 * @access  protected
 */
function __construct()
{
   $this->_serial =& new SerialComponent();
}
/**
 * Pass-thru method for SerialComponent::example()
 *
 * @param   string
 * @param   array
 * @return  array
 * @access  public
 */
function example($type, $params)
{
   return $this->_serial->example($type, $params);
}
}

That’s what was in my /vendors/shells/tasks/serializer.php

From my shell I could now call it like any other task. Do you know of a better method? Keep in mind, I want to use it exactly like a Task, meaning by multiple shells in different methods, so instantiating it when needed becomes more of code bloating IMO. What do you think?

This entry was posted on Friday, October 26th, 2007 at 8:12 pm and is filed under CakePHP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.