I have been working on a magento module for sometime now (not because it is a large module, its my first and I really struggled with it). I now have it working, which I was really pleased with at first, but now I would like to improve it by increasing the reusability of the code.
While making my module I have looked at other modules to learn from them and have seen that many actions are only a line or two and I have tried keeping in with the skinny controller approach but failed, my example is as follows:
I have a function that get a users details that they have inputted into a custom form
protected function _setPostData()
{
$this->_salutation = $this->getRequest()->getPost('salutation');
$this->_f_name = $this->getRequest()->getPost('f_name');
$this->_l_name = $this->getRequest()->getPost('l_name');
$this->_email = $this->getRequest()->getPost('email');
$this->_emailAddressCheck = $this->getRequest()->getPost('emailAddressCheck');
$this->_gender = $this->getRequest()->getPost('gender');
$this->_country = $this->getRequest()->getPost('country');
$this->_pref_lang = $this->getRequest()->getPost('pref_lang');
}
I feel that this is not the correct way to do it and that there is a better way of achieving the same goal, as you can see this function gets the posts data and assigns it to attributes that i've set at the start of the class. I have several other examples that are very similar to the above and if someone could please offer some guidance on this one I am sure I will be able to work out the others
This example is held within the index action, should I put it in a helper as once it created correctly i am sure there will be a few occasions that I will be able to use it again?