Flush ActionController Action's output and continue

Using Neos & Flow Neos Plugin Development
1

Hi

After beeing able to render my nodes to an variable (Render node to variable - #2 by sebobo - works great in general) my controller actions are becoming slower and slower (because the document is getting bigger and bigger). Until now I didn’t find a way on howto render a view using a Command Controller. This would be the most elegant way because I could use queuing services, but I tried a lot without sucess.

However, I now decided to run those background tasks after the (visible) controller results have been flushed to the user and to wait for the PDFs to become ready with a Java Script that triggers a RestController. All of this works, but I’m not able to flush the output to the user.

Calling:

session_write_close();
fastcgi_finish_request();

Ends up in a white page being flushed to the user.

Calling

echo $this->view->render();
session_write_close();
fastcgi_finish_request();

Flushes only the view’s template - but not the whole page. Is there a way to inform the controller that all content should be rendered and flushed?

Thank you for your help.

Jan

2

You might want to go full async processing for something like that and use e.g. the jobqueue package to send work to a background worker process. Less working against the technology, more robust/scalable handling and truly async.

but I tried a lot without sucess.

What did you struggle with exactly?

3

I’m currently using “OutOfBandRendering” (https://github.com/ttreeagency/OutOfBandRendering) to render round about 400 nodes into a HTML file. I don’t know how to initialize a view in a CommandController (to be able to call $this->view). The only way I know would be to use a CommandController to call a ActionController via curl/wget. Or is there another way?

4

You can use the StandaloneView to be able to render templates from outside the Web MVC stack. You maybe need to provide it with a useful ActionRequest (referencing a useful faked HttpRequest) to properly resolve absolute URLs in the template. But for a first step and testing, you can just create a new StandaloneView() and then set the template and render.

1 Like
5

Thank you. But how is it possible to not only paste some variables to this StandardView, but render complete nodes?

6

Ah, yes, sorry. In that case the https://github.com/neos/neos-development-collection/blob/master/Neos.Fusion/Classes/View/FusionView.php is probably what you need. The only issue is, you need to manually inject a ControllerContext with setControllerContext. You can take a look at https://github.com/neos/neos-development-collection/blob/master/Neos.Fusion/Classes/Core/RuntimeFactory.php#L56 on how you to create one. Afterwards you should have a fully working FusionView that you can use to render your nodes, by setting $view->assign('node', $myNodeToRender).

I also just created https://github.com/neos/neos-development-collection/pull/2721 that will allow to use the FusionView without manually creating the ControllerContext, similar to the StandaloneView of Fluid.

1 Like
7

Great. This worked. I used it in combination with https://github.com/Flowpack/jobqueue-doctrine and it’s a big improvement.

However, it seems as if it’s some slower than calling the same functions via ActionController by about 25%. Is this possible or might there be a problem with my implementation? I’ve disabled caches completly to be sure that’s not a caching issue.

8

25% sounds a bit much. How and what exactly did you measure? There’s a bit overhead creating a new php process and bootstrapping Flow to render a node async, but if you work multiple jobs with one call that can be alleviated. Glad you got things working, that’s the first step. Optimization comes on top