CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpcodeigniterpartials
Wayne Kao
Wayne Kao

Reputation: 8285

CodeIgniter or PHP Equivalent of Rails Partials and Templates

In CodeIgniter, or core PHP; is there an equivalent of Rails's view partials and templates?

A partial would let me render another view fragment inside my view. I could have a common navbar.php view that I could point to the inside my homepage.php view. Templates would define the overall shell of an HTML page in one place, and let each view just fill in the body.

The closest thing I could find in the CodeIgniter documentation was Loading multiple views, where several views are rendered sequentially in the controller. It seems strange to be dictating the visual look of my page inside the controller. (i.e. to move the navbar my designer would have to edit the controller).

I've been searching on stackoverflow for a PHP way to accomplish this. I have found this page, which talks about simulating partials with ob_start. Is that the recommended approach inside CodeIgniter?

Upvotes: 6

Views: 7288

Answers (11)

mike wyatt
mike wyatt

Reputation: 1400

this is essentially what I use:

function render_partial($file, $data = false, $locals = array()) {
    $contents = '';

    foreach($locals AS $key => $value) {
        ${$key} = $value;
    }

    ${$name . '_counter'} = 0;
    foreach($data AS $object) {
        ${$name} = $object;

        ob_start();
        include $file;
        $contents .= ob_get_contents();
        ob_end_clean();

        ${$name . '_counter'}++;
    }

    return $contents;
}

this allows you to call something like:

render_partial('/path/to/person.phtml', array('dennis', 'dee', 'mac', 'charlie'), array('say_hello' => true));

and in /path/to/person.phtml have:

<?= if($say_hello) { "Hello, " } ?><?= $person ?> (<?= $person_counter ?>)

this is some magic going on though that may help you get a better picture of what's going on. full file: view.class.php

Upvotes: 5

Kabir Hossain
Kabir Hossain

Reputation: 3105

You can check it, for partials and template

    http://code.google.com/p/ocular/wiki/Introduction

Upvotes: 0

Geshan
Geshan

Reputation: 1141

Try out Ocular - http://codeigniter.com/wiki/Ocular_Layout_Library/ - its a rails inspired templating library.

Upvotes: 0

Phil Sturgeon
Phil Sturgeon

Reputation: 30766

My recently released Template library works in this way.

That template library also plays nicely with my Dwoo implementation which will give your views much more power.

Upvotes: 2

Niran
Niran

Reputation: 1126

Here is a blog post describing how to use smarty with codeigniter. The asp.net like masterpage is also implemented.

Upvotes: 0

Ferry
Ferry

Reputation: 250

I found myself moving from Rails to CI too, and what I did with partials is basically render the partials in the view as a variable and set it from the controller.

So in the view you would have something like (_partial.php):

<h2>Here Comes The Partials</h2>
<?= $some_partials ?>

And you can set it from the controller like:

$this->load->view('the_view', 
   array('some_partials', 
         $this->load->view('_partial', array(), TRUE)
   )
);

Personally, I prefer to use CI's view instead of ob_start, but that's me =) PS: When loading views, first argument is the view name, second one is the parameters to be passed to the view, and the third one is "ECHO" flag, which basically tells CI whether to render it directly or return the value of the view instead, which is basically what I did in the example.

I don't think it's a good solution though, but it works for me. Anyone has better solutions?

Upvotes: 2

Brent
Brent

Reputation: 521

I may be breaking some MVC rule, but I've always just placed my "fragments" in individual views and load them, CodeIgniter style, from within the other views that need them. Pretty much all of my views load a header and footer view at the top and bottom, respectively:

<? $this->load->view( "header" ); ?>
//Page content...
<? $this->load->view( "footer" ); ?>

The header could then include a NavBar in the same fashion, etc.

Upvotes: 13

GloryFish
GloryFish

Reputation: 13358

CodeIgniter and Smarty play nicely together.

Upvotes: 0

troelskn
troelskn

Reputation: 117487

In PHP you'd use include

Upvotes: 3

Elazar Leibovich
Elazar Leibovich

Reputation: 33593

This is unfortunately not CodeIgniter specific at all, however I suggest you to have a look at Savant3 template system. It allows you to render the template to a string. Then you can simply stuck it to wherever you wish.

Maybe there's something like that in CodeIgniter?

I can think of a way to add a facility when rendering the view, to render the template, and then all the sub-template it contains.

Upvotes: 0

Peter Bailey
Peter Bailey

Reputation: 105888

Symfony does this with their partial/component setup.

Upvotes: -2

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