Render a view in PHP

Question

I am writing my own MVC framework and has come to the view renderer. I am setting vars in my controller to a View object and then access vars by echo $this->myvar in the .phtml script.

In my default.phtml I call the method $this->content() to output the viewscript.

This is the way I do it now. Is this a proper way to do that?

class View extends Object {

    protected $_front;

    public function __construct(Front $front) {
        $this->_front = $front;
    }

    public function render() {                
        ob_start();
        require APPLICATION_PATH . '/layouts/default.phtml' ;            
        ob_end_flush();
    }

    public function content() {
        require APPLICATION_PATH . '/views/' . $this->_front->getControllerName() . '/' . $this->_front->getActionName() . '.phtml' ;
    }

}

Answer 1

Example of a simple view class. Really similar to yours and David Ericsson's.

<?php

/**
 * View-specific wrapper.
 * Limits the accessible scope available to templates.
 */
class View{
    /**
     * Template being rendered.
     */
    protected $template = null;


    /**
     * Initialize a new view context.
     */
    public function __construct($template) {
        $this->template = $template;
    }

    /**
     * Safely escape/encode the provided data.
     */
    public function h($data) {
        return htmlspecialchars((string) $data, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
    }

    /**
     * Render the template, returning it's content.
     * @param array $data Data made available to the view.
     * @return string The rendered template.
     */
    public function render(Array $data) {
        extract($data);

        ob_start();
        include( APP_PATH . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . $this->template);
        $content = ob_get_contents();
        ob_end_clean();
        return $content;
    }
}

?>

Functions defined in the class will be accessible within the view like this:

<?php echo $this->h('Hello World'); ?>