How to serve a MVC-view with image paths from directory?

Question

I'm kind of new to the whole MVC concept, since I just recently started developing a web site using CakePHP framework. Therefore I turn to you asking for how to achieve the following in a best-practice-way.

I want to be able to place a number of pictures in a directory, which then is scanned for all filenames in it. These filenames should afterwards be passed to an arbitrary view, which then loops through all filenames making img tags of them.

It would be nice if this could be done in a general way, so that I could reuse the code for same task but with a different directory name.

I have already tried the following two approaches. Nevertheless, non of these felt like the best way to do it, for some reason.

1. Create a model with $useTable=false.
2. Create an ordinary class and import it as a vendor.

What is the best way to achieve what I describe above?

Answer 1

I've done the following before: create an e.g ImageManager class and pass it as an IImageManager to the constructor of your e.g ImageController instead of passing a repository. The ImageManager could then do all the work that you mentioned.

EDIT: I did that in .net mvc and don't have experience of CakePHP, but I guess there's a place where you can register the concrete implementation of IImageManager as ImageManager so the framework would know what to pass to the controller's constructor

Answer 2

I would create a helper for this purpose.

Edit: And for trawling through the filesystem use the Folder class from within your helper.

Answer 3

I'm thinking your original idea is the better one, use the Model to traverse/read/write the directory. Think of the File structure as your data source. You can pass the dirname to the model with $this->data and then let it use the File class to retrieve what you need. This would make it portable across Controllers (with loadModel())

Later on down the road if you move your image paths into a DB you only have to re-write the model to take that into account.