As the ServiceLocatorAwareInterface will likely be removed from the AbstractController in ZF3, dependencies should instead be passed via the constructor or via setter methods.
With this in mind, consider the use case of a user or site controller with actions such as register, activate account, login, logout, etc. At a minimum, this would require a UserService and 2 forms. Add a few more related actions (remote authentication, linking of accounts, etc.) and you end up with 4 or 5 forms.
Passing all these dependencies via the constructor would be messy at best, and more importantly, only 1 form is usually required per action.
Which one of the following techniques do you think is better, and why?
Create separate controllers for each action, so that each controller will only require a single form (in addition to a service). For example RegistrationController, LoginController, LinkAccountController, etc.
- You end up with lots of controllers this way.
In the factory for the controller, supply different forms based on which action is being requested.
- Construction of the controller becomes dependent on this factory, and more specifically the request environment (routing, etc.) You could construct the controller directly (for testing or whatever), but then you would need to ensure that the dependencies were available and throw exceptions if not.
Use the event manager, trigger an event in the controller when a form is required, and let an event handler supply the dependency on demand.
- This technique is described here.
- Your controller would then be dependent on an EventManager as opposed to a ServiceLocator, which is probably not much better.
Pass the FormElementManager to the controller, and request forms from it.
- No better than the SL itself most likely.
Directly construct forms inside controllers.
- How does this affect testibility?
- The same question would then apply to handling a controller with multiple services (instead of forms).
Other?
See also:
- Passing forms vs raw input to service layer
- Factory classes vs closures in Zend Framework 2