Catalyst begin/end methods

Munkey has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dear monks, I require your wisdom!

I am using Catalyst and am very happily chaining away, however, I was trying to use begin/end methods in my controllers to do controller-specific stuff which would be needed in the respective controller.

now when I have a Root, a Foo and a Foo::Bar controller, and call a path resolving to an action in Foo::Bar, I was expecting this:

Root->begin gets called

Foo->begin gets called

Foo::Bar->begin gets called

... called action doing stuff here, e.g. Foo::Bar->hello

Foo::Bar->end gets called

Foo->end gets called

Root->end comes last.

Is this expectation entirely off? Or is it spot on and I am doing something wrong somehow? I have built a simple Catalyst application like hinted at, and I only see Root->begin and Root->end ... If anyone could provide me with an insight on what I am wrong about or how to achieve what I would like, that would be really neat :)

Comment on Catalyst begin/end methods

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Re: Catalyst begin/end methods by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Feb 12, 2015 at 00:19 UTC
http://dev.catalystframework.org/old-wiki/wiki/FlowChart/—try that. It’s old but I believe it’s still accurate. I think your understanding of `begin` is closer to what `auto` is. You get one `begin` and one `end` unless you specifically code around it. The resolution would also be easy to test in any specific cases, I think, by looking at the debug output of the test server. FWIW, I can’t remember ever needing `begin`. It is probably an indication of design mistake that could be better handled with an attribute attached to the class.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: Catalyst begin/end methods by Anonymous Monk on Feb 12, 2015 at 01:04 UTC
https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/Catalyst-Manual/lib/Catalyst/Manual/Intro.pod#Built-in-actions-in-controllers-autochaining seems to agree with that chart	[reply]
Re^3: Catalyst begin/end methods by Munkey (Novice) on Feb 12, 2015 at 08:21 UTC
thank you! I have ended up moving everything to auto, begin ( I was checking user permission to enter controller ) is better there anyhow - just return 0 to break flow, end ( preparing things for templates specific to that controller ) did not have to be in end, it was just a matter of taste I guess, and no logical reason to do it there. After reading the chart: my expectation was off, only the most specific match for begin and end is run. Auto does what I need here. Thank you for the information, I did not find the part on begin/end ( or overlooked it ) in the docs for some reason.	[reply]
Re: Catalyst begin/end methods by Anonymous Monk on Feb 12, 2015 at 00:10 UTC
I was expecting this Why were you expecting that? What did the docs say?	[reply]