Firing cakePHP components callbacks on error404

I often use $this->cakeError('error404') in my controllers to stop processing the request (and return a 404 error) when the supplied parameters are buggy or incomplete.

A strange side effect

I recently spotted a strange side effect on the latest site I was developping. It used a pretty large html footer filled with links dynamically fetched from my database.

As all pages (no matter what model/controller they were refering to) were using the same footer, I created a component with a simple startup method to fetch them all and return them to the view. I added this component to my AppController so that every controller will inherit it.

This worked nicely until I spotted that on error pages, the footer was left mostly empty. I was because my Component callback was never fired.

How's that?

When detecting an error, cake starts using its ErrorHandler and thus do not fire callbacks.

Fortunatly, you can create an AppError class (in app/app_error.php) and overwrite the ErrorHandler method. Namely, the error404. I rewrote mine to explicitly fire the initialize and startup methods.

class AppError extends ErrorHandler {
  function error404($params) {
    $this->controller->Component->initialize($this->controller);
    $this->controller->Component->startup($this->controller);
    parent::error404($params);
  }
}

I only fired two of the callbacks, but maybe beforeRender and shutdown should be fired too.