Is doing Transaction Management in the Controller bad practice?

Question

I\'m working on a PHP/MySQL app using the Yii framework.

I\'ve come across the following situation:

In my VideoController, I have a actionCrea

Answer 1

Best Practice: Put the the transactions in the model, do not put the transactions in the controller.

The primary advantage of the MVC design pattern is this: MVC makes model classes reusable without modification. Make maintenance and implementing new features easy.

For example, presumably you are primarily developing for a browser where a user enters one collection of data at a time, and you move data manipulation into the controller. Later you realize you need to support allowing the user to upload a large number of collections of data to be imported on the server from the command line.

If all the data manipulation was in the model, you could simply slurp in the data and pass it to the model to handle. If there is needful (transactional) functionality in the controller, you would have to replicate that in your CLI script.

On the other hand, perhaps you end up with another controller that needs to perform the same functionality, from a different point. You will need to replicate code in that other controller as well now.

To that end, you merely need to solve the transaction challenges in the model.

Assuming you have a Video class (model) with the setPrivacy() method that already has transaction build in; and you want to call it from another method persist() which needs to also wrap its functionality in a larger transaction, you could merely modify setPrivacy() to perform a conditional transaction.

Perhaps something like this.

class Video{
    private $privacy;
    private $transaction;

    public function __construct($privacy){

        $this->privacy = $privacy;
    }

    public function persist(){
        $this->beginTransaction();
        // ...action code...
        $this->setPrivacy($this->privacy, false);
        // ...action code...
        $this->commit();
    }

    public function setPrivacy($privacy, $transactional = true){
        if ($transactional) $this->beginTransaction();

        $this->privacy = $privacy;
        // ...action code..

        if ($transactional) $this->commit();
    }


    private function beginTransaction(){
        $this->transaction = Yii::app()->getDb()->beginTransaction();
    }

    private function commit(){
        $this->transaction->commit();
    }
}

In the end, your instincts are correct (re: That leads to duplicated code in a lot of places where I need transactions for the action.). Architect your models to support the myriad of transactional needs you have, and let the controller merely determine which entry point (method) it will use in it's own context.