how-it-works.md

How it works

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
Here we combine theory and practice: nothing works and no one knows why.

Unknown

Basics

Library wraps sunrise/http-router library for now. Plan is to create a context aware router that will be able to handle both REST and AJAX requests. This router will then be globally usable in the DI system which we're planning to implement.

Execution flow

By default - library does nothing. It needs at least one controller for it to initialize.

When you register a controller (or multiple controllers) - the following flow is executed:

Ajax_Server

1. XWP\Ajax_Server::instance() function is called which will register the initialiation on plugins_loaded (priority: PHP_INT_MAX)
2. Class will check for existence of xwp_ajax_slug option and set it to wp-ajax if it doesn't exist (this will flush the rewrite rules)
3. Class will add the xwp_ajax query var to the list of query vars.
4. Singleton will create and instance of Request_Dispatcher on parse_request action if the query var is present.

Request_Dispatcher

1. Defines the standard PHP constants (DOING_AJAX, WP_ADMIN)
2. Initializes router
3. On parse_request:10 action dispatcher will initialize the controller classes and their decorators
4. Controller decorator wraps the controller and forwards the response to a Response_Handler which creates a PSR-7 response object
5. Response object is then sent to the client

Looks good - how do I use it?

We're still working on the documentation. But you can check the NestJS documentation for the basics. We're trying to mimic the way NestJS handles things.