The problem is, what if I want to display the results of a different DB?

With the caveat that I'm also new to Catalyst, this is what I used for generic DB access (for serving up JSON in my case).

sub data : Chained CaptureArgs(2) {
    my ( $self, $c, $model, $object ) = @_;
    # ...
    $c->stash( model => $model, object => $object );
}

sub list : PathPart Chained('data') {
    my ( $self, $c ) = @_;
    my $model = $c->stash->{model};
    my $object = $c->stash->{object};
    # ...
    $c->stash( json_data => [ $c->model($model)->resultset($object)->a
+ll ] );  
}
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