Going from the Controller to the View

Question

I am working on creating my own very simple MVC and I am brainstorming ways to go from the controller to the view. Which involves sending variables from a class to just a plain old PHP page.

I am sure that this has been covered before, but I wanted to see what kind of ideas people could come up with.

//this file would be /controller/my_controller.php

class My_Controller{

   function someFunction(){

  $var = 'Hello World';
  //how do we get var to our view file in the document root?
  //cool_view.php

   }

}

Answer 1

Some kind of hashtable is a good way to do that. Return your variables as association array which will fill all the gaps in your view.

Answer 2

Store your variables as a property in your controller object, then extract them when rendering

class My_Controller {

    protected $locals = array();

    function index() {
        $this->locals['var'] = 'Hello World';
    }

    protected function render() {
        ob_start();
        extract($this->locals);
        include 'YOUR_VIEW_FILE.php';
        return ob_get_clean();
    }
}

You can define those magic __get and __set methods to make it prettier

$this->var = 'test';