seanmonstar

Get the Method Caller in MooTools

As I continue to work on my MVC implementation in MooTools, I continue to find new hidden features in MooTools. This weekend, I was adding a view method to the controller, as a shortcut to creating a new View and rendering it. One of the arguments is the view file name, but I also wanted some automagic like CakePHP. It’d be great if the view function could determine the file name based on the function that called it.

Here’s what I mean:

var ItemsController = new Class({
	view: function(view_name) {
		if(!view_name) {
			//viewname should default to 'controller/method'
		}
	},
	list: function() {
		$(this).grab(this.view()); // 'items/list'
	}
});

Every method in a MooTools Class is wrapped in some decorators, that set the caller on the function object when called. By staring and counting how many methods back I needed to collect, I’ve accomplished my goal. However, this won’t work if a standard function calls this method. It might be a good idea to protect this method, now that I think about it.

//inside view function
view_name = arguments.callee.caller.caller.caller._name;

Don’t believe me? Test it right here. As neat as this is, I don’t gaurantee this will work in every situation, and I haven’t tested if any browsers break using this.