I'm trying to make with ZF one common design that I'm using on other web application that I'm working with/on.

As the thread title states, it's about MVC overloading. The idea is to be able to load controllers and view scripts from different locations according to their existence and priority set initially .

I want to setup two modular structures the first contains the shared modules and a second one the application specific modules.

For example I have 3 modules :

1. Page - manages general propose pages on the website (intro, about us, contact us, etc.)
2. Navigation - manages site navigation (menus, locator, etc)
3. Product - manages products (whatever you want)

The modules "Page" and "Navigation" are shared modules and I want to use them on many applications. The module "Product" is specific for the current application.

The module directory structure is in the form :

Currently with ZF in my bootstrap I can do :

Request : page/index/index

The dispatcher will search in 'app/modules' (module directories are added FILO) for folder 'page' if the folder exist it will route to it. But in app/modules/page/controllers/ the index controller doesn't exist, exception is thrown, as expected.

Here I want :

1. The dispatcher to search the others module directories for the controller
2. Search again from the first module directory for the view script

In this way I can use the shared Page IndexController but the specific view script for my app overloads the default page layout script.

Request : page/contact/index

The dispatcher will find the controller but the view script doesn't exist. I assume here that the contact controller is using the view renderer in the most classic way.

Here I want : The dispatcher to search in all the module directories for the view script, according to the route.
So I can use my new custom ContactController but with the default contact page layout.

All the searches are made in the way the addModuleDirectory is called FILO (first in last out). In this way we put priority in overloading between the modules.

Any ideas how I can implement this ?

I think it's possible to do it with one controller plugin, but I'm not very good in OO design so any help with ideas and suggestions is welcomed.
I'm able to write scripts with this level of complexity but I lack good design background.

Thanks

The only way I think you can do this is to extend your controller with those rules you want inside of it. In this case, I don't know if the effort is worth it.

Maybe if you write a plugin , and implemente the routeShutdown method you are able to implement your custom logic in it. In the method , first check if the controller exists by generating the controller name with the provided route method ( I don't recall it's name but it exists).
You can check if it exists or not by using Zend_Load and catching the generated exception(if any). If it does not exist , implement your custom logic. Does this help?
Anyhows , you can modify and alter the route in a plugin in any phase of the the dispatch process. I have used the previous aproach to implement error handling in previous releases of ZF.
regards

Thanks for your suggestions.

I don't see any other way to share functionalities (modules) in many apps. There is other way and it's symlinks on *nix based machines. To make symlink in my app for each shared module. Is is worth ? Yes, definitely. You can make common modules and reuse them !

As Khelo says I think it's possible to do it with a controller plugin using the routeStartup and routeShutdown. I'll give it a try to see if I can do something.

Thanks