[FEATURE] let 4-full's controllers be able to handle more than one models

[panique]

Currently the 4-full version uses one model per controller, this means for example a controller Animal uses the animal_model (automatically). I've seen this quite often in several frameworks, but it has the huge disadvantage that only one model can be used at a time.

A more professional architecture would be to let the developer decide which models he/she wants to use in the controller (manually), and

1. pass all models to the view or
2. collect data from all models in a $var (let's call it... ehmm.. $model) and pass this $model to the view

I've seen solution #2 in Grails (which is a framework for Groovy), obviously this is also used in other frameworks.

My questions to all of you:

a.) Does anybody know how what the professional name of $model is ? I mean, is THIS the model or are the two used models the models ? Hmm.. it's hard to describe this...

b.) What would be the most professional way to do this ? Is there a definitive way to do this ?

Code of current behaviour:

class Overview extends Controller
{
    function __construct()
    {        
        parent::__construct();
    }

    function showUserProfile($user_id)
    {
        // model is automatically loaded (by the Controller from which we extend)
        // result of the getUserProfile() method is passed to view property
        $this->view->user = $this->model->getUserProfile($user_id);
        $this->view->render('overview/showuserprofile');        
    }    
}

What the new behaviour could look like (partly pseudo-code):

class Overview extends Controller
{
    function __construct()
    {        
        parent::__construct();
    }

    function showUserProfile($user_id)
    {
        // manual loading of model #1
        $overview_model = new Overview_model();
        // manual loading of model #2
        $foo_model = new Foo_model();

        // create empty container for model data
        $model = array();
        // get data from model #1, pass it into an empty variable $model (?)
        $model["user_profile_data"] = $overview_model->getUserProfile($user_id);
        // get data from model #2, pass it into an empty variable $model (?)
        $model["example_foo_data"] = $foo_model->doStuff($user_id);

        // pass the $model to the view (maybe not necessary)
        $this->view->render('overview/showuserprofile', $model);        
    }    
}

[ghost]

Like I mentioned before, you could accomplish this by autoloading your models. this way you don't have to require your model classes. also I don't see why it is useful to pass the model in the render function. first of all, the name $model (array) is not suitable because it does not contain models but data returned by the models instead. So a more suitable name would be $data= array(). This array contains all data returned by all models. Then just pass the data array to the view the normal way...like so
this->view->data= $data;

#215

[panique]

Done in develop branch! Models are NOT autoloaded, they can be easily loaded within a controller with $x = load_model('mymodel');, $x now contains a new mymodel object. A controller can now load multiple models at once. All models share one database connection btw ;)