cakephp - try/catch an Action

Question

I would like to somehow apply a try catch statement to all Actions as a backstop for any uncaught exceptions.

I think this would be particularly helpful for Ajax Actions, because the catch statement could send back a default 4xx status code. Prototype's onFailure() function could then do the client-side error handling.

How can I do this without wrapping the Action call with a try/catch in the cake dispatcher like this:

try {
    output = $controller->dispatchMethod($params['action'], $params['pass']);
}
catch {...}

Does anybody have a suggestion or another workable strategy for gaining this functionality without touching the dispatcher?

How do people feel about putting exception handling in the Displatcher? I imagine when cake drops php 4 support, there will be a built-in mechanism for this.

[Edit] I've looked into the cake Error Handling. Without try/catch it seems like there is a big loss in functionality. And, I am hesitant to mix cakeErrors and other Exceptions.

Answer 1

I'm not too sure why you would want to do this. You can check the params to see if it's an ajax call in the controller using,

if($this->params['requested'])

I don't know what kinds of exceptions your application might create, but if it's a missing action, view or similar, Cake will output an error page, which you can customise in the app/views/errors folder.

The book has some information on how to handle errors using CakePHP's built in error handler here, http://book.cakephp.org/view/154/Error-Handling

You could also have a google around for articles and tutorials on creating your own custom error handler, or extending the built in one, so that it wraps all dispatch calls in a try{}catch{} from the core of the dispatch cycle. 'cakephp custom error handler' google link ( http://u.nu/8bgv7 ) although I think those articles might be a bit old, so check the date against what version of Cake you're using.