How can I extend the AccountController using events rather than inheritance?

Question

I've successfully extended the core Mage_Customer_AccountController via inheritance (using an approach very close to this one), however I'd rather use events to add my extra functionality.

In my case I need to hook in to the request before it's sent to the loginAction(), as well as before _loginPostRedirect().

So far I've found mention of an event, controller_action_postdispatch_customer_account_loginPost, which should be close to what I need for the _loginPostRedirect() hook. I've tried finding the exact point that this event is raised to confirm, but it appears to be a dynamic event which I haven't approached before.

So, to sum up my question, which events would I need to hook into? And if the controller_action_postdispatch_customer_account_loginPost is involved, could someone point me to intro resources on dynamic events and their dispatch?

Answer 1

I think what you are looking for is actually the predispatch rather than postdispatch events unless I am miss understanding your request.

These events can be found in Mage_Core_Controller_Varien_Action->preDispatch where right at the bottom you see the following lines of code.

Mage::dispatchEvent('controller_action_predispatch', array('controller_action' => $this));
Mage::dispatchEvent('controller_action_predispatch_' . $this->getRequest()->getRouteName(),
    array('controller_action' => $this));
Mage::dispatchEvent('controller_action_predispatch_' . $this->getFullActionName(),
    array('controller_action' => $this));