Use an exception object as your response

One of the great thing about Catalyst is its strong separation of concerns. This of course is a hallmark of the MVC pattern. However there are times when it is a bit onerous to always require a separate view to build a response. For simple cases you can now just throw an exception in your controller (or in code called by the controller) and if that exception conforms to the interface defined by Plack::Middleware::HTTPExceptions we automatically build a meaningful HTTP response.

    package MyApp::Controller::User;

    use base 'Catalyst::Controller';
    use HTTP::Exception;

    sub find_user_at :Path('') Args(1) {
      my ( $self, $c, $arg ) = @_;
      $c->stash(user => $c->model(‘DB::User’)->from_id($arg) || 	
        HTTP::Exception->throw(404, status_message=>”Not Found"));
    }

    1;

In the above example we have a URL template like "/user/{:arg}" and we expect the $arg to be an ID that can be used to find a User resource from some storage such as a DBIx::Class backed database. However it is possible that the user will not be found from th given ID. In that case we want to return something meaningful to the client, such as a 404 NOT FOUND response. In the example above this is what we do.

Catalyst supports this via the now included Plack::Middleware::HTTPExceptions and you can use HTTP::Exception or HTTP::Throwable. However the interface is trival and its easy to roll your own expection objects.

I find this technique works well when I need to rapidly mock up an API or in the beginning stages of development when I don't have all the error response pages I need. Its also great for simple demos! I find it falls apart when the response case is more complex, such as if the response needs to be subject to content negotiation (for example when you API can support XML or JSON).

You should review Plack::Middleware::HTTPExceptions for more details.

John Napiorkowski jjnapiork@cpan.org