What's the purpose of dispatching requests with missing controller or action in the route match?

[wesperinteractive]

I don't really understand the purpose of dispatching requests without a controller or an action in the route match.

I think Zend\Mvc\RouteListener (line 47.) should check the existence of the controller and action parameters too. If any of them are missing, it should trigger an error (MvcEvent::EVENT_DISPATCH_ERROR). The name of the error could be "Application::ERROR_ROUTER_INVALID_MATCH" or something similar to that. It should express that we have a route match, but it cannot be used to start the dispatch process.

If we do so, we can remove the default values from the getParam functions in the following files:

Zend\Mvc\DispatchListener

$controllerName = $routeMatch instanceof RouteMatch
    ? $routeMatch->getParam('controller', 'not-found')
    : 'not-found';

==>

$controllerName = $routeMatch instanceof RouteMatch
    ? $routeMatch->getParam('controller')
    : 'not-found';

Zend\Mvc\AbstractActionController

$action = $routeMatch->getParam('action', 'not-found');

==>

$action = $routeMatch->getParam('action')

These small things (and there are much more) make the life harder for people trying to understand the flow of MVC appliactions. We are in the middle of a dispatch event and the framework is checking whether controller or actions paramters are defined or not... It's weird. At least for me. Opinions?

[Xerkus]

Sorry for the late reply.

Reason is separation of concerns.
Route listener is not aware of controller or action key usage. Its responsibility is to match a request to one of defined routes and extract matched parameters.
Dispatch listener is not aware of action key, it is something provided by action controllers.
As an example, Middleware listener does not use controller key at all and looks for middleware instead.

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