Why are Action classes used over Controller?

[samuelgfeller]

I'm a beginner and am unsure about where I should ask this question. If it's not the right place here let me know and I'm sorry.

So until now I always worked with Controllers and saw that the slim skeleton is with Action classes. My questions are:

• What is the reason you chose Actions over Controllers?
• What are the benefits of using Actions over Controllers? I know that only the absolute needed dependencies have to be loaded which makes the app more efficient but would multiple Controllers with specific dependencies not be good enough? And there could be multiple "actions" which use the same dependencies; wouldn't it be cleaner to make one Controller with these "actions"? It would avoid having to create a new file for each request.
• For a big project wouldn't it have a lot of files where it's not handy to find a specific request? Wouldn't it be easier to search in a Controller?
• And what would you recommend me to use for a big project with multiple big modules?

Thanks in advance for your answers. I know that you all do that for free, and I am already a big fan of slim, so I'm really thankful for all this!

[l0gicgate]

This is just a design choice. I don't want to say one is better over the other. But in the case that multiple actions require the same dependencies, I would suggest that you create an abstract action and have other actions extend it.

Example abstract class UserAction

• ListUsersAction extends UserAction
• PersistUserAction extends UserAction
• DeleteUserAction extends UserAction
• RestoreUserAction extends UserAction

You get the idea.

For a big project wouldn't it have a lot of files where it's not handy to find a specific request? Wouldn't it be easier to search in a Controller?

I personally think it's easier to find a singular action than trying to find a method within a large controller. In PHPStorm I just do entire project search Ctrl + Shift + N and type in the prefix of the action, the type of entity and it pops up.

And what would you recommend me to use for a big project with multiple big modules?

I have a project with over 400 actions in it. It's really just a matter of preference.

[samuelgfeller]

Okay thank you very much for clarification

[samuelgfeller]

Relevant argument in favour of Action Classes over Controllers:

Note: Closures (functions) as routing handlers are quite “expensive”, because PHP has to create all closures for each request. The use of class names is more lightweight, faster and scales better for larger applications.

Source: https://odan.github.io/2019/11/05/slim4-tutorial.html