Zend Framework getAction method

I am new to MVC and Zend, so I have little idea what I am doing at the moment, but here is my question.

The following code is my get method for an API I am attempting to build in order to learn both. It works as is, but given the sparsity of code I have seen in example methods, and the fact that Zend seems to do a lot for you, is there a better way of doing this? The code is something I cobbled together because the tutorial that I was walking through forgot to add the get method code.

public function getAction()
{
    // action body
    // Is there a better way to get the id from the URL?
    $this->_getAllParams();
    $request = $this->_request->getParams();

    if (array_key_exists($request['id'], $this->_todo)){
        $return[] = array($request['id'] => $this->_todo[$request['id']]);
    }else{
        // error code here or call some error method?
        // do I do error coding here or send a message to some handler/helper?
    }
    echo Zend_Json::encode($return);
}

Essentially this will take a URL and pass json encode information that is currently stored in an array, i.e:

http://restapi.local/api/1

Will display:

[{"1":"Buy milk"}]

The routing takes place in the bootstrap:

class Bootstrap extends Zend_Application_Bootstrap_Bootstrap
{
    public function _initRoutes()
    {
        $front = Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance();
        $router = $front->getRouter();
        $restRoute = new Zend_Rest_Route($front);
        $router->addRoute('default', $restRoute);
    }

}

Below is the full ApiController.php:

```
class ApiController extends Zend_Controller_Action
{
public function init()
{
/ Initialize action controller here /
$this->_helper->viewRenderer->setNoRender(true);
$this->_todo = array (
"1" => "Buy milk",
"2" => "Pour glass of milk",
"3" => "Eat cookies"
);
}

public function indexAction()
{

By using Zend_Rest_Route you are on a good way. I wouldn't recommend making it the default route though, as I had trouble when using MVC-stuff which required additional params not specified in the route, e.g. for a paginator. You could also move the routing-configuration to your application.ini to keep your Bootstrap-class clean.

I recommend simplifying your getAction() by using:

$id = $this->getRequest()->getParam('id', null);
$id = $this->_request->getParam('id');

Both are identical, but I prefer using the get-methods in case I use them to override the handling of the underlying class-property (in this case $this->_request). The second argument specifies the default value to be used, if the param is not set (by default this is null).

edit: Also, instead of

$this->_todo[count($this->_todo) + 1] = $item;

$this->_todo[] = $item;

this will automatically append $item to $this->_todo, even if the variable is not yet initialized.

StackExchange Code Review Q#12964, answer score: 2