Handling exceptions in a Front Controller plugin – Rob Allen’s DevNotes

Rob Allen wites in his DevNotes; If you have a Zend Framework Front Controller plugin which throws an exception, then the action is still executed and then the error action is then called, so that the displayed output shows two actions rendered, with two layouts also rendered. This is almost certainly not what you want or what you expected.

This is how to handle errors in a Front Controller plugin:

1. Prefer preDispatch() over dispatchLoopStartup() as it is called from within the dispatch loop
2. Catch the exception and the modify the request so that the error controller’s error action is dispatched.
3. Create an error handler object so that the error action works as expected.

This is the code:

< ?php class Application_Plugin_Foo extends Zend_Controller_Plugin_Abstract { public function preDispatch(Zend_Controller_Request_Abstract $request) { try { // do something that throws an exception } catch (Exception $e) { // Repoint the request to the default error handler $request->setModuleName('default');
$request->setControllerName('error');
$request->setActionName('error');

// Set up the error handler
$error = new Zend_Controller_Plugin_ErrorHandler();
$error->type = Zend_Controller_Plugin_ErrorHandler::EXCEPTION_OTHER;
$error->request = clone($request);
$error->exception = $e;
$request->setParam('error_handler', $error);
}
}

}

That’s it.

via Rob Allen’s DevNotes.