My thoughts on the Action pattern

The Action pattern is a relatively new design pattern that's become popular in the PHP community, particularly with Laravel Developers.

The pattern is a simplified version of the Command pattern, with no separate Handler class. The Action class is responsible for the handling and execution logic.

In most cases, an Action class only has a single public method called execute() or handle(), or uses PHP's __invoke() magic method.

This is a different approach from a Service class that has multiple methods to perform different tasks.

Here's a simplified version of the code of an Action from my website:

<?php

readonly final class AddRandomCtaToDailyEmail {

public function __construct(private EntityTypeManagerInterface $entityTypeManager) {
}

public function __invoke(DailyEmail $email): void {
// Checks a call to action isn't already added.
// If not, a random one is selected and added.
}

}

Note the DailyEmail class is a bundle class I've created that extends the regular Node class.

Different to a service, the class name describes the action being performed - usually starting with a verb followed by a noun to describe the action being taken and the object it's being taken on.

It's a simple pattern that doesn't require additional packages or libraries, and it's easy to implement in different frameworks and other languages.

Whether you call this an Action, Command or something else, I like that it encourages writing more structured code that's easy to read and test.